3 October 2024

Auditory hallucinations in neurosis – how to recognize them?

omamy słuchowe w nerwicy

Anxiety neurosis is a group of disorders that destabilizes a person’s functioning and introduces certain limitations into their everyday life. Very often, in extreme cases, the life of a sick person comes down to being locked at home and listening to the signals coming from their own body and tormenting themselves with thoughts. Actually, anxiety neurosis is actually being a prisoner in your own body with a constant feeling of dread, dread and worry that something bad is going to happen. This disease can not only cause problems but also destroy your life, and the fight against it is long and difficult, but definitely worth the price, the result of which is to improve your health.

Unfortunately, the somatic symptoms of anxiety neurosis are often confused with other diseases. This makes the anxiety neurosis one of the most difficult neuroses to diagnose. The essence of this disease is the formation of a self-propelling mechanism, the so-called vicious circle, in which anxiety states trigger disturbing somatic and psychotic reactions in the body. This leads to even more anxiety hallucinations. The patient feels constant fear for his health and life.
The neurotic person reacts too overreacting to a certain situation, and the response is not proportional to what the situation requires. Unfortunately, anxiety neurosis is difficult to diagnose. Moreover, its causes are still unknown. It can be caused by either one factor or a combination of factors, for example, genetic, biochemical imbalances, and life experience.

auditory hallucinations in neurosis - symptoms

Psychology specifies that common anxiety disorders include panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, social anxiety disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Of course, symptoms can be both physical and mental. The first symptom is an irrational and unfounded fear that something bad will happen. Some of the symptoms are listlessness, difficulty concentrating, and irritability. Physical symptoms include dry mouth and throat, rapid breathing, increased heart rate, palpitations, trembling of arms and legs, muscle twitching, sweating, feeling cold, dizziness and light-headedness, nausea, hyperacidity, insomnia or excessive sleeping. fatigue and lack of energy, excessive or reduced sex drive .

Anxiety neurosis covers many types of disorders, and therefore, treatment options for it depend on the type of disorder. Usually, therapy is used in conjunction with medications. Without access to therapy, the patient has no chance of being cured of neurosis. Medicines can be various types of antidepressants, as well as antipsychotics and benzodiazepines.

Neuroses are often accompanied by auditory hallucinations. These are simple or complex sounds, often a group of people and dialogues commenting on the patient’s behavior and the voice of the sick person, which may last from a few minutes to several hours. In the case of neurosis and auditory hallucinations, one should always consult a specialist doctor. If you are interested in what exactly auditory and visual hallucinations are, then it is worth reading everything related to this ailment, any advice from good sources and websites will answer your questions and will be a great source of knowledge. The content of many of them is very accessible and interesting.

Symptoms of auditory hallucinations in neurosis

Auditory hallucinations can be both single sounds and fully formed voices. The voices may be repeated, or there may be more than one voice in the mind of the sick person talking to the sick person or about the sick person. Remember, however, that auditory hallucinations must be clearly distinguished from your own thoughts.

During neurosis, auditory sensitivity and auditory hallucinations are very often increased. Very often you hear very soft sounds that can come from very far, such as your own heartbeat or the sound of flowing blood and breathing. Neurotic anxiety can cause tinnitus, which makes it difficult to concentrate on what is going on around you. Noise distracts, overwhelms and drowns out sounds from the environment.

Auditory hallucinations are short and one-off sounds or sounds that last longer and are more complex. They are often crackles, screams, words or music. Auditory hallucinations are very realistic sensations that make it very often unclear whether the sound was just an illusion. Auditory hallucinations are a common condition in psychiatry. The person experiencing hallucinations may also hear their own thoughts, words spoken directly to them, and even words of third parties talking about them. There are also imperative hallucinations that are classified as auditory hallucinations. The sick person hears voices urging him to do something; they are either imperative or imperative. It happens that people who have committed a crime are explaining this state. Hallucinations are pathological phenomena occurring in schizophrenia, organic psychoses and disturbances of consciousness. In affective disorders, they occur less frequently and rather relate to severe forms of mania and depression. In the diagnosis of diseases such as schizophrenia, hallucinations, i.e. pseudohallucinations, consist in the impression that within one’s psyche someone has sent or taken away thoughts, while one’s own thoughts become voiced or repeated like an echo. Unfortunately, doctors still do not know the exact causes of auditory hallucinations in neurosis.

It happens that hallucinations can be associated with an acute period of the disease, and after the end of the disease, which is usually associated with pharmacological treatment, it may disappear without a trace. However, it also happens that hallucinations can be chronic and persist for many years. From time to time, hallucinations may appear under the influence of strong emotions and may also affect healthy people. These are, for example, wishful hallucinations in which a deceased person speaks to the sick person and may even see it. In this case, we are dealing with the border between norm and pathology.

Auditory hallucinations are characteristic of paranoid schizophrenia. The sick person hears rustling, clattering, voices speaking in a specific language, sometimes imaginary. If the person hears his own thoughts before they are verbalized, it is first-person hallucinations. If the voices are called outside voices and commands are hallucinations in the other person. On the other hand, if the voices “talk” to each other about the sick person, these are hallucinations spoken in the third person.

how to recognize auditory hallucinations in neurosis

Auditory hallucinations in neurosis at night

The common feature of neurotic people suffering from sensory hallucinations is the lack of a real stimulus affecting the sense. In addition, the person may also experience pseudo-hallucinations, or pseudohallucinations. These are abnormal sensations that, like hallucinations, arise without external stimuli, but the sufferer locates them inside his body. They take the form of verbal pseudohallucinations, which a person describes as voices in the head. Hallucinations also occur in healthy people. For example, hallucinations during awakening, also known as hypnopompic hallucinations, or hallucinations while falling asleep, also known as hypnagogic hallucinations, also known as sleeping hallucinations. Such hallucinations are usually visual or auditory hallucinations and are more like dreams, but they are much more intense.

Auditory illusions in neurosis

A very common auditory illusion, which also affects healthy people, is the feeling that you hear the phone ringing. The ring signal is a kind of phantom. Very noisy surroundings can be to blame for this phenomenon and the fear of not hearing a ringing phone, therefore the fear and stress of waiting for an important message make us hear something that is not there. However, auditory illusions are not the fault of the ears. Eyes are also complicit, so if in the case of both senses registering ambiguous information, the human brain seeks to obtain an understandable result, then we are dealing with the so-called the McGurk effect: that is, hearing with eyes. How to explain it? It’s just what we look at greatly influences what we hear. In the case of people suffering from neurosis, auditory hallucinations have a different level, they become stronger and occur much more often than in healthy people. It happens that auditory illusions in neurosis assume the sound of a door scraping, even though the sound is not actually present.

Olfactory hallucinations neurosis

A properly functioning sense of smell can not only make everyday life easier (thanks to it we are able to choose fresh and good foods), it also has an important share in the perception of taste sensations and brings aesthetic and pleasant smell sensations, but also warns us about the dangers such as smoke. or escaping poison gas. In addition, it is involved in the secretion of saliva and gastric juice. The sense of smell is also a source of experiences, emotions and sexual behavior.

Impairment of this sense may take the form of an impaired sense of smell, i.e. hyposmia, or a complete lack of smell, i.e. anosmia. Sometimes there is also an abnormal perception of smells, known as parosmia. Smell disorders result from a very long nerve pathway from the olfactory receptor to the cortical center in the brain, which is responsible for analyzing smell. Abnormal odor sensations may occur in depression. On the other hand, in schizophrenia and neurosis, olfactory hallucinations appear, most often in the form of very unpleasant odors. 

Olfactory hallucinations are perceived as abnormal, usually unpleasant, odors that are not actually present in the physical environment. Their presence is disturbing and disrupts the normal lifestyle. Odors can be chemical in nature or they can smell of spoilage and mold. Among chemical odors, they can be salty or burnt, metallic, bitter or hard to describe. They rarely show a sweet character. Among the rotten smells – they are almost always fecal. Sometimes these hallucinations are mixed – chemical and rotten.

Katarzyna Kroteniuk

Editor-in-chief of diet4u.org blog

View all posts by Katarzyna Kroteniuk →

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