Promising results from a new digital therapy could help tackle one of psychiatry’s most intractable problems — hearing voices.
Auditory verbal hallucinations are one of the hallmarks of psychosis, particularly in people with schizophrenia, which affects 24 million people globally. These voices often bully or abuse the voice hearer, commenting incessantly on the person’s thoughts and behavior or even urging them to harm themself.
A new multicenter Phase 2/3 trial in the United Kingdom published in Nature Medicine found that distress from these voices and their severity and frequency lessened after 16 weeks of digital avatar therapy. In this behavioral therapy, participants talk with an animated head and voice that resembles the chatter in their head. The study authors suggest that externalizing the voices in a digital avatar might allow the person to gain power over the hallucinations.
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