Understanding and managing hallucination subthemes with participant quotes
| Theme 4: understanding and managing hallucinations | Quote |
| Onset in low lighting | ‘They annoy her, especially at night. She says Mummy, I don’t get many throughout the day, but I get loads at night.’ (P3) ‘It’s quite random. I see them whenever I’m in a dark place usually. That’s when I see them, but normally they’re just random really.’ (C4) |
| Onset during stress | ‘Definitely stress is playing a huge part and if we keep her stress-free, she doesn’t have them as much, but when she’s stressing more, then they are far more frequent.’ (P3) ‘I can ignore it more when I’m distracted. I think when I’m stressed or upset it does happen more.’ (C6) |
| Triggers within physical environment | ‘I was in my bedroom, and it was really dark, and then I could see a figure standing by my door. My door was closed and I knew that it wasn’t there, but it was even scarier than it would probably be in daylight.’ (C5) ‘Some of the triggers are, for example, if I’m doing a load of ironing and I hang them on the doorframe, I have to warn him in advance because he comes along and he sees headless bodies or people hanging.’ (P6) |
| Strategies to mitigate hallucinations | Changing physical environment: ‘If I close off a door, it shuts off more vision of what I can see, so it reduces the amount of what could happen. There’s nothing that could appear out of thin air behind anything.’ (C6) Blinking: ‘There are some nights where there’s smaller ones which don’t really bother her because she can move them by blinking her eyes, she can move them to the corner.’ (P3) Eye and head movements: ‘I just look away, when I look away, and then look back, most of the time, they’re gone.’ (C5) Self-regulation: ‘Sometimes I just take a minute and just breathe. I calm myself down, or I just take a minute just to get calm again.’ (C2) Reframing: ‘I’ve learned to understand that they’ll just be there, sometimes, and then I know that mostly, I just know that they’re not real, or it’s not there.’ (C5) Reframing/changing physical environment/touching the hallucination: ‘I talk to myself to say that they’re not real. I turn the light on to see if that helps. Sometimes I get mum or dad. Sometimes I try to picture them like they’re cute little things instead of scary things. You try to touch them to prove they’re not there.’ (C4) |