Hey guys!
I hope you’re all doing well! I’ve read a few similar posts but wanted to put a new one up and get your opinions as the others were a few years old. Quick background: 6months ago I had a full on psychotic break which lasted about three months. I was living in uk at the time so seeing a psych team there. Then I moved home to different country and was put on anti psychotic by the psychiatrist I see now. She never saw my when I was fully psychotic as my symptoms remitted pretty fast with treatment. They think I have BPD but still unsure if I may have schizophrenia too.
Anyway lately I have had some hallucinatory symptoms and paranoia returning. Hallucinations have been visual and I told my pdoc this today and she said it was very rare… but from what I’ve read on here and other places it seems like quite a lot of you guys visually hallucinate?
Mine are never full on seeing something like a person but as follows;
Faces in things
Seeing shadowy figures out the corner of eyes
Room moving/ spinning
Walls breathing
Fuzzy vision / can’t focus
Shadows in corners of eyes
Bugs/ flies
These are usually very disturbing and disrupting to me.
After I told her this and some other things today she’s now referred me for an MRI to rule out brain injury etc. I guess I’m just wondering if anyone else got diagnosed without auditory hallucinations and if you do see things, what type of things?
that sounds like about right, usually pretty benign stuff for me, but not too much on saphris, it works pretty good for normalizing my brain on that front except the bugs. god I hate the bugs.
I can get visual hallucinations.
They are pretty common for me when I’m not stable.
Visual hallucinations are usually not as common as auditory hallucinations but still do occur.
It’s a good thing that you are getting an MRI.
Sometimes having visual hallucinations is due to an organic issue with the brain.
Yea I’m really glad they are taking it seriously and giving me a proper work up. I doubt it is an organic cause. Did you guys get mri’s before being diagnosed?
I had a neurological work up before eventually being diagnosed with sz. Without anti psychotics I get more visual and tactile hallucinations than auditory. But whole on the haldol, if I do have any hallucinations, they’re usually auditory.
These visual hallucinations sound very similar to what I experience, apparently visual hallucinations are less usual than auditory, but like you said a fair few people here seem to have visuals too. I’m constantly jumpy because of them, I understand how disruptive it can be when you’re seeing things all the time.
Those are pretty much exactly the visuals I get, add in floating and dancing lights, liquids dripping down my periphery, and sub in cats where there are no cats for insects.
NB: my diagnosis is major depression with psychotic features, not schizophrenia. My understanding is that visuals are more common in my diagnosis than they are in straight sz.
I was asked once by a doctor if I saw things and I think she was expecting me to say yes. It does mean something but I’m not sure what.
I have bipolar disorder and have had numerous psychotic episodes. Occasionally I see clear visual hallucinations but usually shapes and things in the corner of my eye. Not sure if it’s related to being in the computer for too long, a side effect of the medication or actual brain damage from psychosis.
I would ask your doctor what it means if you do see things as I think it has something to do with differential diagnosis.
I’ve experienced the things you’ve described. A lot of it for me was like I was seeing some other plane of reality superimposed on this one, so seeing for example faces on things like you say. Often demons on walls or carpet looked like spiders
@MeghillaGorilla1 what do you mean by differential diagnosis? This makes sense actually because my pdoc was saying something today about how visual hallucinations are more common among non schizophrenics i.e. Bpd or bp etc… except I didn’t understand what she was saying at the time so thanks for helping
They are far worse when I’m in a depression - I came across a visuals journal I was keeping for my doctor while I was profoundly sick and hardly 15 minutes went by without seeing something. Now I see something every few days or so.
I have schizoaffective. I don’t really have visual hallucinations besides distortions, which happens rarely. I’ll see that someone has bright pink hair when it’s actually brown when I look back at them. People’s hair and clothing just sometimes are the wrong shape or color (like bright colors when they’re actually neutral colors), then I do double take and see the real thing and realize it was a distortion.
That’s another thing. For me, this comes up most when I’m reading, and the words will be replaced with something truly bizarre - picnic will become octopus, for example. I think, wtf?! and look again and everything is normal. I had a few instances of this in the last week and I need to keep an eye on it, because it’s a sign that I’m getting symptomatic.
Do you see them vividly? The bugs I mean.
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