1 in 20 People Have Hallucinated

About 1 in 20 people in the general population have experienced at least one hallucination in their lifetime that wasn’t connected to drugs, alcohol or dreaming, according to a new study.

Researchers analyzed information from more than 31,000 people in 18 countries who were interviewed as part of a mental health survey from the World Health Organization. Participants were asked whether they had ever heard voices or seen things that didn’t exist, or if they had experienced a delusion (a false belief), such as the thought that their mind was being controlled or that they were being followed.

The study excluded people who possibly had a psychotic disorder, such as schizophrenia or manic depression, which can cause hallucinations and delusions. Therefore, the findings show that hallucinations and delusions are not always connected to serious mental illness, the researchers said.

“We used to think that only people with psychosis heard voices or had delusions, but now we know that otherwise healthy, high-functioning people also report these experiences,” study co-author Dr. John McGrath, a professor at the Queensland Brain Institute in Australia, said in a statement.

Overall, nearly 6 percent of people surveyed said they had experienced at least one hallucination or delusion in their lifetime. Hallucinations were much more common than delusions; about 5 percent said they had experienced a hallucination, compared with only about 1 percent who said they had experienced a delusion. [Senses and Non-Sense: 7 Odd Hallucinations]

Researchers refer to experiences that involve a disconnection from reality (such as hallucinations and delusions) as “psychotic” experiences. For most people in the study, these psychotic experiences were infrequent; among those who said that they had experienced a hallucination or delusion, about one-third said that it occurred only one time, and another third said that the experience happened from two to five times.

“People should be reassured that there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with them if it happens once or twice,” McGrath said. “But if people are having regular experiences, we recommend that they seek help.”

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I doubt that delusions occur less frequently than hallucinations. If you ask people if they are delusional most will simply say no. But this is the premise of delusions, that there is no insight. It is interesing however, that scizos are not neccesarily a disease but simply more prone to a somewhat normal phenomenom. Id like to believe this at least, that there is some degree of continum for mental ilnesses.

I wonder whether the combination of hallucinations and delusions is more pertinent to the presence of serious mental illness than hallucinations alone. That could account for the disparity between delusions and hallucinations amongst those deemed non mentally ill.