Dialogue with your hallucinations: a promising therapy for schizophrenia

Between 60 and 70% of people with schizophrenia have auditory hallucinations, most often in the form of voices that threaten, torment, or persecute them. If treatments based on antipsychotics manage to partially silence the latter, they remain ineffective in around a quarter of patients. They then feel completely powerless in the face of these oppressive inner monologues. But today, a new therapeutic approach could help them: avatar therapy

Imagined by psychiatrist Julian Leff, from University College London, this method is based on an original idea: getting the patient to dialogue with their own inner voices. With the help of a trained therapist, he begins by creating, using dedicated software, a virtual character that resembles the voice he hears as closely as possible, both in appearance and in appearance. through his physical appearance and the way he speaks. And this character is then programmed to say the words spoken by these auditory hallucinations. Then, the dialogue begins under the supervision of the therapist who guides the session, maintains control over what the avatar says and supports the patient. From session to session, in a secure environment, the latter learns to stand up to the voice and resist it. Giving it a concrete and tangible form facilitates confrontation and helps the person suffering from schizophrenia to escape the state of submission imposed by their hallucinations.

The results, published in the journal Nature Medicine last October, are promising. After sixteen weeks of therapy, subjects who combined avatar therapy with their usual treatments felt less distress related to auditory hallucinations, compared to those who did not benefit from this method. And when therapy is accompanied by an exploration of the trauma associated with persecuting voices, people even note that they appear less often than before…