Helping People with Hallucinations on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert, and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association

of Certified Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the

problems that people

face. I'm honored this week to be joined on the podcast by Dr. George Sanders, an ACBC certified member,

and a medical doctor in Southern California. And we're talking about this issue of hallucinations

and how to think of them from a Christian and a biblical perspective.

Dr. Sanders, we are really glad that you're here and serving us in this way. And I want to

begin by just asking you what is a hallucination? Well, good morning. It's nice to be here.

A hallucination, Heath is very simply sensations that seem to be real, but that are created in the mind.

For an example, you're hearing.

You might hear voices, or you might see things that are not real.

You might even smell or taste things that aren't real.

Or you may feel things crawling on your skin, but when you look down, there's nothing there.

And hallucinations can be caused by a variety of things.

First of all, most people who have hallucinations are without any type of disease.

About 10% of all of us have hallucinations at some point in our lives.

There are, of course, medical reasons for hallucinations.

If you have Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, you may have hallucinations.

If you have a seizure disorder, or if you're withdrawing from alcohol, you may have hallucinations.

Certainly all of us think of LSD and certain types of mushrooms as producing hallucinations.

And mental illness, whether it be schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, they say that up to 80% of schizophrenics have auditory, that is, auditory hallucinations.

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