Educational reference
About this symptom
A hallucination means perceiving something that others do not. Hearing voices is the most common form, though hallucinations can involve any sense: seeing, feeling, smelling or tasting.
The most important thing to understand is that the perception is genuine. The person is not imagining, pretending or exaggerating; the brain is producing a perception that feels identical to a real one. This is why telling someone that what they hear is not real is rarely helpful and often damaging to trust.
Voices vary considerably. They may be one or many, familiar or unknown, occasional or near-constant. Some are neutral or even companionable; others are critical, threatening or commanding, and those are correspondingly distressing.
Many people find that voices become more intense with stress, tiredness or isolation, and less so with treatment, structure and support. Some learn to manage them well enough to live with them.
Hallucinations also occur outside schizophrenia, including in severe depression, bipolar disorder, some neurological conditions, during bereavement, with substance use, and with sleep deprivation. Their presence alone does not indicate any particular diagnosis.