Neuroscience
When it comes to the ‘positive’ symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hearing voices, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has mostly be used to help reduce the distress and burden that they can cause. But now Jerome Favrod and colleagues in Switzerland have tested the idea that CBT could help tackle the cognitive deficit that some argue causes the voices to be heard in the first place.
One theory for why people with schizophrenia hear voices is that they mistake their own inner thoughts, or words they are planning to say, as being of external origin. Favrod’s team recruited a 38-year-old patient who heard voices that he believed belonged to an evil spirit. They tried to help him better recognise the source of the words he heard.
During training, the researchers would pick a category such as ‘fruit’, and then show the patient a picture of one fruit, name another fruit out loud, show him the written name of another fruit and finally ask him to name a fruit. Later they presented him with a list of all the fruits mentioned, and asked him to recall which fruit he had named, and which had been shown in a picture, written or named out loud. They taught him to better remember items he had suggested by using personal memories – for example if he suggested apple, to link this with an apple tree in his grandmother’s garden.
After 6 hours of training over 11 weeks, the patient was better at recognising his own suggestions, and better at recalling the personal memories he had tied them to. Crucially, his auditory hallucinations were also improved and continued to be improved at follow-up a year later.
“Even though we report a single case study, we think that the results definitely encourage the potential use of cognitive remediation for auditory hallucinations”, the researchers concluded.
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Favrod, J., Vianin, P., Pomini, V. & Mast, F.W. (2006). A first step toward cognitive remediation of voices: a case study. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, 35, 159-163.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
A new approach to help those who hear voices
When it comes to the ‘positive’ symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hearing voices, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has mostly be used to help reduce the distress and burden that they can cause. But now Jerome Favrod and colleagues in Switzerland have tested the idea that CBT could help tackle the cognitive deficit that some argue causes the voices to be heard in the first place.
One theory for why people with schizophrenia hear voices is that they mistake their own inner thoughts, or words they are planning to say, as being of external origin. Favrod’s team recruited a 38-year-old patient who heard voices that he believed belonged to an evil spirit. They tried to help him better recognise the source of the words he heard.
During training, the researchers would pick a category such as ‘fruit’, and then show the patient a picture of one fruit, name another fruit out loud, show him the written name of another fruit and finally ask him to name a fruit. Later they presented him with a list of all the fruits mentioned, and asked him to recall which fruit he had named, and which had been shown in a picture, written or named out loud. They taught him to better remember items he had suggested by using personal memories – for example if he suggested apple, to link this with an apple tree in his grandmother’s garden.
After 6 hours of training over 11 weeks, the patient was better at recognising his own suggestions, and better at recalling the personal memories he had tied them to. Crucially, his auditory hallucinations were also improved and continued to be improved at follow-up a year later.
“Even though we report a single case study, we think that the results definitely encourage the potential use of cognitive remediation for auditory hallucinations”, the researchers concluded.
__________________________________
Favrod, J., Vianin, P., Pomini, V. & Mast, F.W. (2006). A first step toward cognitive remediation of voices: a case study. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, 35, 159-163.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- The Voices Heard By People With Schizophrenia Are Friendlier In India And Africa, Than In The Us
When a patient with schizophrenia hears voices in their head, is the experience shaped by the culture they live in? Tanya Luhrmann and her colleagues investigated by interviewing twenty people diagnosed with schizophrenia living in San Mateo, California;...
- What's It Like To Hear Voices That Aren't There?
Traditionally, when a person says they can hear voices that don't exist in external reality (not to be confused with inner speaking), psychiatry has treated this as a sign of mental illness. However, it's become clear in recent years that many...
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It isn't just people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia who claim to hear voices inside their heads. Many other people do too. However, a key difference between psychiatric and non-psychiatric voice hearers is that the latter usually claim not to be...
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Do you eat a piece of fruit on the way to work or school everyday without even thinking about it? Perhaps that is the full extent of your fruit eating? If so you're just the kind of person who won't be helped by public health information campaigns...
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A True Fruit Fly - Tephritidae (via Myrmecos Blog) Bjoern Brembs has written extensively about the latest anti-science commentary by VP candidate Sarah Palin, who said... Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You've heard about...