While many recognize it as a condition characterized by “high” and “low” mood swings, BD symptoms can also include auditory hallucinations. In fact, up to 25 per cent of people who have BD experience auditory hallucinations at some point during their illness.
A better understanding of BP and auditory hallucinations is the focus of a new Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funded study co-led by Dr. Natalia Jaworska, an early-career scientist at the University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research (IMHR) at The Royal.
The study will be among the first to examine brain features of people with BD who do versus do not have auditory hallucinations.
Auditory hallucinations can be scary and confusing, involving sounds and voices of varying intensity that no one else hears, but often feel very real to the person experiencing them.
Auditory hallucinations also occur in other mental health conditions such as schizophrenia. While there is research on the effects of hallucinations in schizophrenia, they are poorly understood in BD.
It is believed that people who hear voices might have differences in their brain in regions involved with sound and linguistic processing, but a deeper understanding is needed. What is known, however, is that people who have auditory hallucinations – regardless of diagnosis – struggle with daily living and are less likely to recover.
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