Dennis Holcombes Minds Eye

“A Beautiful Mind”

Hallucinations

• relax - voices are often caused by stress, so try to focus on your breathing.

• distract yourself - focus on a task or watch tv.

• ask your voices a question, that you dont know the answer to - if they dont know the answer the voices must be coming from within you.

• background sounds - people have reported that listening to music or having the tv on sort of drowns the voices.

• talk back to your voices - ask them to leave and say no if they order you to do things, remind yourself who’s in control.

• know your triggers - it may help to keep a diary of when the voices are more active.

• medication - modern anti-psychotics are 80-90% effective in revieling voices and will often make them disappear.

Delusions

• distraction - same with hallucinations.

• give them facts - checking facts and statistics may help

• talk about them - in my case, the more i talked about my thoughts, the more unrealistic they seemed. That may not happen to everyone, but it is helpful to talk about them.

• know your trigggers - same with hallucinations.

• medication - same with hallucinations.

Don’t

• dont isolate yourself - this is common among people with schizophrenia, but talking about what youre experiencing, or at least see a friend, is helpful