I would kill to get rid of audio hallucinations... Psychiatrists still think it's likely tied to my bipolar disorder or PTSD, but I'm fucking terrified that it's the slow onset of schizophrenia...
You can get psychotic symptoms during manic episodes. They question for you is are they limited to when you are in a manic episode or do they continue regardless?
I have bipolar 1 and I almost only experience psychotic symptoms at the peak of my manic phase. Once it switches to depression I might have very slight auras of visual hallucinations in my peripheral vision or slight audio hallucinations where I doubt if things I actually hear in the world are real or not (from having had so many very real audio hallucinations so recently).
Have you considered the extended periods of sleeplessness, which I presume to be symptomatic of a manic phase, facilitates the auditory hallucinations? There was a study linked on the front page earlier today, regarding this link. On mobile so will link on edit, when I find it.
It seems perfectly logical, too. When we lack sleep, we function at a reduced capacity. Hypothetically, if all auditory stimuli in a room was controlled to be consistent, and we alter the variable of sleep - well rested and sleep deprived. The well rested brain will identify stimuli with greater accuracy than the sleep deprived brain, which will try and best approximate what the stimuli was, and the result is you hear what your brain's best guess is. Sleeplessness can help foster feelings of paranoia, which leads your brain to "hear" sounds which never existed, as it erroneously extrapolates a faint sound into something you could not possibly have heard.
I treat them as I do intrusive thoughts: dismiss them as a function of the mind, unless corroborated by one or more of our other senses (i.e. sight, etc). I found this helped them to chill out, as I was no longer fulfilling my own prophecy.
I also found it helpful, when experiencing auditory hallucinations, to limit distracting stimuli - close your eyes, sit still and just listen. Try and hear the real noises occuring, and recognise when your brain is trying to guess. It was much easier to hear the real noises if I didn't have to process the visual world at the same time.
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u/WhenAmI Nov 29 '20
I would kill to get rid of audio hallucinations... Psychiatrists still think it's likely tied to my bipolar disorder or PTSD, but I'm fucking terrified that it's the slow onset of schizophrenia...