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Claire was 10 years old when she started hearing voices. They would torment her, call her names and tell her to self-harm.
She tells Helen Pidd about her experience of psychosis, where reality is disturbed by hallucinations and delusions. For decades, she struggled to get effective treatment until she joined a digital avatar therapy trial.
“The principle is that you sit down with your therapist and design the avatar,” journalist Jenny Kleeman tells Helen. This allows the clinician and patient to “manifest the voices that people hear in their heads and experience them 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 webcam,” Jenny explains. “The therapist plays two roles: in one respect, using their own voice, they are the therapist there to guide the patient and help them but, with a click of a mouse, they become the voice of the avatar.”
The patient then communicates with the digital avatar, and eventually challenges them. Claire was in her early fifties when she signed up for one of the trials.
“It was only about five minutes, the first session, but something had changed because I did answer back. The voice was telling me to stop my medication. And then I just said: ‘Well, it’s not a good idea to just stop.’ And he said: ‘Who says?’ And I said: ‘Well, everybody, really, everybody else.’ And apparently, that was a big breakthrough. I’d never spoken back to him like that. And it just kind of grew from there, really.”
Within about eight weeks of sessions, the voice Claire was hearing completely disappeared.
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