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The Sights and Sounds of Schizophrenia
Drug Company Creates Simulation of Illness'
Symptoms
 Listen to Joanne
Silberner's report.
 View
a multimedia slideshow of highlights of one Janssen Pharmaceutica
simulation of a schizophrenic episode.
(You need a Real Player to view this. Download the player.)
Aug. 29, 2002 -- The textbook description of
schizophrenia is a listing of symptoms: delusions, hallucinations,
disorganized speech and behavior. But what does schizophrenia really
feel like? NPR's Joanne
Silberner reports on a virtual reality experience that simulates
common symptoms of the mental illness.
Janssen Pharmaceutica,
a company that makes a drug treatment for schizophrenia, has created
a multimedia simulation that it says lets a participant see the
world through the eyes and ears of a person with schizophrenic
illness. Janssen created the simulation as an education tool for
doctors and others who want a more visceral understanding of the
illness.
Silberner, who experienced the simulation, says it
works this way: "For five to 10 minutes, someone wanting to know
what it feels like to have untreated schizophrenia puts on goggles
and headphones, and sees and hears a range of hallucinations. You
can choose your virtual reality -- what happens on a trip to the
doctor's office, or on a ride on a city bus." In the program she
experienced, a caseworker takes the schizophrenia patient to a
grocery store with a pharmacy in the back, to refill a prescription.
To create the virtual reality project, technical director
Stephen Streibig consulted a group of people with schizophrenia,
including Daniel Frey, 26. Frey describes what he and Silberner
experienced in the program: “When you first walk into the pharmacy,
you’re walking through the aisles and there are people staring at
you, just staring at you from every aisle. And there’s one instance
where there is a woman sort of protecting her children from you when
you walk through the aisle.
"This, of course, is really a
delusion, it’s part of the schizophrenic thinking, that everyone is
looking at you and paying attention to you and is afraid of
you."
Silberner describes more of the simulated
hallucinations: “People in the produce aisle disappear, and no one
else notices -- were they ever really there? From a TV monitor, a
man in a commercial yells directly at you. The label on a bottle of
pills turns into a skull and crossbones."
Hearing voices is
a nearly universal symptom of schizophrenia, and the simulation
reproduces that in a way that Frey says is very authentic, and
Silberner says is alarming: “The voices jump around you -- they’re
in front, now behind, now to your left, now on your right. They're
persistent, impossible to ignore or filter out."
Dr. Sam
Keith, medical advisor on the virtual reality project, is a veteran
psychiatrist who’s heard thousands of patients describe
schizophrenic episodes. Still, after trying the simulation, Keith
said, “When it’s real, it’s different -- it’s very frightening, it’s
very scary."
Streibig said that’s precisely the effect he
hoped to achieve: After years of the illness being misdiagnosed,
mismanaged and stigmatized, he says, “People should understand what
it’s like to go through this."
Even though schizophrenia
patient Frey consulted on the project, he found the simulation too
disturbing to sit all the way through. When Silberner tells him she
was terrified by the experience, Frey responds, “Yeah, you ought to
be… Imagine not being able to take off the goggles, the
helmet."
Browse
more NPR stories on schizophrenia.
Other
Resources
• National Schizophrenia Foundation
• Janssen
Pharmaceutica
• The Web site for the National Mental
Health Association has a fact sheet on schizophrenia and how to detect symptoms in children.
• The
first-ever report on mental health by the U.S. Surgeon
General has extensive information about schizophrenia and other
mental disorders.
• National Alliance for the Mentally Ill
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