Title.
For example, if someone hallucinates a person standing in front of them, can they reach out and make contact? Does the hallucination somehow prevent contact?
Is this stupid??
In: Biology
Schizophrenia, for reasons unknown to myself, tends to manifest in visual and aural hallucinations. As a public defender, I work with many schizophrenic people, and anecdotally I’ve never heard of one having tactile hallucinations. (Edit: except bugs or worms on/under the skin, that’s pretty common, I just wasn’t thinking of that as a hallucination per se, but I guess it is) But the hallucinations themselves aren’t usually something you could feel – it’s the TV telling you your mom is going to kill you, or the wall socket connecting via UV light to your smartphone so that your apps can track you, or people in the next room shouting about how they’re going to get you, stuff like that. It’s (almost) never a thing in the room which isn’t actually there, it’s usually the thing that is there doing something it definitely isn’t doing, or hearing something you can’t see.
And when it is something that isn’t there, like subdermal microphones so that the garbage company knows what you’re throwing out, there’s always some extra layer od delusion that prevents them from touching them, like they retract into your muscles when you cut your skin open to get them, or a team of technicians came.and removed them while you slept, or something. Delusions protect themselves from confrontation by inventing more delusion.
I’m not a psychiatric doctor, I’m just a criminal defense lawyer who deals with a lot of schizophrenic people, but this is what my experience has been over the years.
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