Claire She was 10 years old when she started hearing voices. They were torturing her, calling her names and telling her to self-harm.
Troy Helen Bede About her experience of psychosis, where reality is disturbed by hallucinations and delusions. For decades, she struggled to find effective treatment until she joined a digital avatar therapy trial.
“The principle is that you sit with your therapist and design an avatar,” the journalist Jenny Kelman He tells Helen. This allows the doctor and patient to “show people the voices they hear in their heads and experience as real, external voices.”
“The therapist is in one room and the patient is in the other, and the therapist can watch the patient in the other room over the webcam,” Jenny explains. “The therapist plays two roles: In one respect, using their own voice, they are the therapist there to guide and help the patient, but with the click of the mouse, they become the voice of the avatar.”
The patient then communicates with the digital avatar, ultimately challenging them. Claire was in her early 50s when she signed up for one of the experiments.
“It was only about five minutes, the first session, but something changed because I answered back. The voice was telling me to stop my medication. Then I just said, ‘Well, it’s not a good idea to stop.’ And he said, ‘Who says?’ And I said “Well, everyone, really, everyone, and apparently, that was a huge breakthrough. I never talked to him like that and it just kind of grew from there, really.”
Within about eight weeks of sessions, Clare’s hearing had completely disappeared.
Guardian support today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod
