Can we talk about visual hallucinations?

I know a good percentage of my posts are me b*tching about stuff like this but I wana talk about it.

Other people have visual hallucinations, right? From schizophrenia? Because drs seem to not believe or acknowledge the presence of visual hallucinations in psychiatric illnesses. My psychiatrist will be like "Visual hallucinations in psychiatric disorders are extremely rare" and then she'll ship me back to see my neurologist who will dutifully do an exam, go back over my MRI and tell me I'm fine. I'm essentially being ping-ponged back and forth. If I'm brain damaged or something I want to know but the neurologist says I'm not. Now granted I'm not visually hallucinating very much at all anymore it's frustrated to not feel validated or whatever when it happens.

Seems like drug induced phsycosis. They tend to be visual and wear off.

You have a psychiatrist who has some gaps in her education.

Many people with a formal diagnosis of a mental health condition, medicated or not, do not experience visual hallucinations. Many people who are apparently normal and unmedicated do experience visual hallucinations. Two good resources are neurologist Oliver Sack's recent book Hallucinations and the Hearing Voices Network of peer support groups.

I experience visual hallucinations. Mine are related to my dissociative identity disorder and are always, without exception, meaningful to me. They do not frighten me now that I understand their function.

I read online from people "malingering" their mental illness(faking it) usually say they experience visual hallucinations. Like for example, one criminal who said he saw a giant monster destroying the interview room. Genuine visual hallucinations are of normal sized objects, can be seen with the eyes closed, and are usually in colour. Of course everyone is different, but if you went to a forensic psychiatrist, he would say you're faking it if you saw something otherwise.

Personally, I know that I see stuff that aren't there that if I told someone, they wouldn't recognize it as a typical visual hallucination. I see objects that are "see through", similar to a hologram, that I am able to manipulate. However, I've read about people who see demons and stuff so I don't know what your psychiatrist is thinking. They're not all trained in everything.

I heard a doctor , i think, say that we all experience visual hallucinations. If somebody dreams of a pink elephant that's a hallucination, the difference could be that someone see's a pink elephant while they are awake, and eye's open. It's definetely possible, not to much of a stretch.

Thank you for taken time to respond to me, guys. Well its not that i'm seeing pink elephants or anything lol. These days it's mostly like, bugs and shadows and sutff. I've talked to others who have stuff like this. Its just frustrating.

I hear you Renegade. I sometimes get visual hallucinations that consists of wavy lines or a big bright yellow ( not the sun of course!:)) light. I tell my pdoc about them and he just says it's from something else. I know my VH's aren't of people or anything so I don't know how pdocs measure the type and intensity of VH. But the way I see it as with any other illness you cannot understand until you've gone through it yourself. I think there are different schools of thought within the wonderful world of psychiatry.

RenegadeRebel -- I see the same types of things. Humanoid adult-sized shadows, sometimes child-sized but very rarely; hyper-realistic nonexistent animals; and insects, usually moving or crawling, never more detailed than light and shadow. My visual stuff only happens when I'm dealing with a lot of anxiety and stress.

I read the same segment on malingering in Google Books, and thought it was pretty funny.. but it also made me a bit paranoid about being doubted by future docs. Thankfully thus far everyone involved in my care has been respectful and has tried to be understanding.

Lot of times, when my eyes catch a tall brown haired lady, for a second, I believe that I am seeing my ex girlfriend, even though I KNOW she is not there.

Is that a hallucination? Like, I KNOW that I just WANT to see her, and KNOW that she is somewhere else but for a second I make myself believe that I am seeing her.

SamGabor wrote:Lot of times, when my eyes catch a tall brown haired lady, for a second, I believe that I am seeing my ex girlfriend, even though I KNOW she is not there.

Is that a hallucination? Like, I KNOW that I just WANT to see her, and KNOW that she is somewhere else but for a second I make myself believe that I am seeing her.

That's called "predisposition". Our vision and our memory banks don't always work the way they should, and sometimes if you glimpse someone or something, your brain will instead process it as something similar which you are interested in. For example, seeing a brown-haired lady and thinking that it is your ex-girlfriend (because the memory of your ex-girlfriend is still very strong, and your brain is trying to suggest that the memory is similar to what you just saw).

Another good example, which you can test for yourself, is based on cars. Let's say you buy a new red car. Driving home, you suddenly notice there are many more red cars on the road than you previously noticed. It's because you're currently very interested in red cars, they are a frequent thought of yours, and your eyes are working to pick out everything that looks similar to "red cars" because you're thinking about it in the back of your mind.

Someone correct this terrible explanation, I'm probably way off base but this is my personal understanding of it.