False perceptions & false beliefs: Understanding schizophrenia

1. The symptoms Hallucinations (false perceptions) and delusions (false beliefs) are characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia. Typical hallucinations include: hearing people talking to you or about you, hearing a running commentary on your actions, and hearing your thoughts spoken aloud. Typical delusions include; believing that other people can hear your thoughts, believing that your actions are being controlled by external forces, and believing that people are sending you secret messages (Mellor 1970). When reporting these symptoms, patients are trying to describe extremely unusual experiences and, as is indicated by the typical verbatim examples given below, the symptom labels listed above do not fully capture these experiences (examples from Kambeitz-Ilankovic et al. 2012).