Hello Everyone, My son is nineteen years old. He does not hear voices, but sees very disturbing things, such as people fighting, people killing each other, seeing satan, seeing creatures or monsters from movies he has seen in the past. He plays shooting type video games 8 to 10 hours a day. I decided to look up any information about playing video games and psychosis. His psychiatrist is saying he thinks he has depression with psychosis, but could have schizophrenia. He said it is to soon to give a diagnosis. … Any way, when I looked up psychosis and video gaming, I read an article in which a psychiatrist said she had 5 young adults come to her complaining that they were having hallucinations. She asked them if they played video games and they all said they did. She advised all of them to stop playing game for at least four weeks. After 4 weeks all of them no longer experienced hallucinations except one. The one that did not get better was a young adult male that was so addicted to video games, decided not to quit playing the games. I showed my son the article and he has agreed not to play for 4 weeks to see if he has any improvement. He is on Seroquel right now after trying Risperdal which did not help and it looks like Seroquel is not going to work either since he has been on a higher dose now for five days and no improvement. Maybe I’m just grasping at straws, but does any one have any info on this? I think it is worth a try… I really feel like my son needs to be admitted, but he doesn’t want to go… I also believe he has Aspergers. We have focusing on the hallucinations lately, but when we see his psychiatrist next week, I will mention Aspergers to him…
Try and make sure no one is making him hallucinate visually.
Yes there are some that can do that to people, they can feed visual sensory information into the brain and make people see things.
I only have my instincts about violent video games. I don’t know about hallucinations, but I bet violent video games can feed into destructive behavior patterns for some individuals. I said this on a site once, and the young guys on it took issue strongly against what I was saying. Don’t expect those guys to accept your misgivings. I spend a lot of time on the internet, but I don’t play any games besides solitaire. I can see how those games can be addictive.