Scientists used fake hallucinations to probe the minds of people with psychosis

A new study from England, published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry suggested that the difference between people who hallucinates and have difficulties getting through their day without clinical help from the ones that hear voices but can do a regular life, is the way they interpret their own psychoses. 

In the research they put 260 people under simulations of psychotic experiences and then they studied how the participants reacted. Of those 260 participants, 84 of them were clinical psychosis patients, 92 were not patients, although they also had psychotic symptoms, but this group didn't need medical care to live. Also, researchers said that those 92 people used specialist sources such as mediums, online forums for psychic and spiritual activities...The rest of the participants were just a control group without psychosis symptoms. 

The researchers used magic tricks like memory games in which they seemed to be able to read the participants' mind, and others. Then, the researchers did an interview with the participants to interpret their experiences. 

After this, the results showed that the clinical group was as able as the nonclinical group to identify psychotic symptoms as psychoses. So this suggests that the reason that some people is more able to avoid getting too disturbed isn't because of recognizing that what is happening isn't real.

The difference between the two groups they say is because the clinic one seemed to see something dark and mean behind what was happening and in change, the nonclinical group found spiritual explanations. 

MY OPINION: 

I think that this study is very interesting because it shows that the difference between people with psychosis who need clinical help from the ones who don't is just the way they interpret their psychosis symptoms. 

So it may be a great advance to the knowledge of the clinical treatment. It could open doors to new methods to treat psychosis because, as we have seen, the ones with clinical treatment react the same way as the one who don't have a treatment, but the second ones use other methods to explain those symptoms and this way they don't get to see a dark side on what they hear or feel during their days, and this way they can live a regular life. 

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