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Why are visions important to explore?
At least one in three people with psychosis experience distressing visual hallucinations, also known as visions – seeing things that others cannot. When visions occur, they can have a detrimental impact on people’s lives, such as more frequent and prolonged hospital admissions, and greater likelihood of suicide. Despite these, visions are poorly understood and there are no effective treatments for these.
However, our previous research and close work with people who see visions be very difficult to talk about and they are not often explored in peoples care within mental health services. We really want to change this and make better treatments for people.
To do this, we must first listen and learn from people’s experiences of visions. So we are looking for 900 people with visions and psychosis to take part our study, VISION-QUEST.
What is VISION-QUEST exploring?
Our previous research has found that the way in which people make sense of their visions are one of the keys factors driving distress. For example, when people thought visions were negative or threatening, they found them to be more distressing and this had a bigger impact on their lives. The next step is therefore to explore this on a larger scale to understand more about people’s appraisals of their visions. Then this can be used to validate a scale of visions appraisals and develop targeted treatments for these.
To do so, this study will develop a questionnaire focused on people’s beliefs about visions. It will also explore the relationships between these appraisals and other difficulties which people may experience, such as poor sleep or high worry.
By developing a new measure and our knowledge of causal mechanisms of visions, it will be the next important steps to developing better treatments for these.
What is a vision?
Visions (also known as visual hallucinations) are the experience of seeing something that others can’t. We are still learning about visions and therefore we are really keen to hear about all types of these experiences: different content, frequencies, duration, and levels of distress. This way we can capture a good representation of what visions are really like for people.
For more information about…
The research team, click here
VISION-QUEST is now closed to recruitment, results will be announced on this page when available.
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