Don't do it without supervision, I nearly jumped 100m because the voices in my head convinced me I'm a Star Trek captain and will be transported to my bridge mid-jump.
Never do anything to confirm a paranoid person's psychosis unless you have total control of the situation and a psychiatrist supervision. Never try to peace them by saying unrealistic things, you never know what's going on in their head that you just confirmed. My GF tried to reassure me by saying she will be with me in 15 minutes, but she was 100km away and I thought "okay well that makes all of this real, let's do it".
Prtty much echoing what you said, in this video Cecila McGough, who has schizophrenia, talks about how important it is that people don't do anything to confirm her hallucinations.
That's good to know, but it leaves you without many options, since all the experts also suggest not to confront them with reality. So how to interact with somebody who as a psychosis and sees a complete twisted reality?
Since she was 100 km away, it didn't make sense she was going to be there in 15 minutes by normal means, so it meant either she was lying or OP was actually going to be teleported. OP apparently chose to believe the latter, since it confirmed their current delusion.
So it didn't postpone anything, maybe if she had given a realistic ETA (or just said "I'm coming, wait for me") it would have worked though.
It's very difficult to know what to do in these situations though, I've been on the side of that girlfriend and you just can't have a full understand of what's going on in the head of the other person, everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines.
Retrospectively, it was a total blunder - not truly hers since she couldn't be expected to act perfectly in that situation, but it's definitely something we've discussed as the TOP ONE thing to never do and always mention it to others when discussing situations like that.
It didn't postpone anything. I called her because I knew I'm going mad and wanted to confirm if it's true or not. Of course I didn't word it this way, though. What she said confirmed the delusion, nearly got me killed and even though I didn't jump, I got lost in the city, hurt myself, nearly hurt others, until someone called the police few hours later.
Without supervision? What good is that? This is a disease that breaks people. Those who would convince themselves to see such symptoms in a positive light are doing nothing but damage.
Yes. What I mean is that doing it can have unintended consequences - so don't do it if you don't know what you're doing and/or not fully in control of the situation.
I find this fascinating. Could you please elaborate about anything youd find relevant/interesting about how such delusions come about without being obvious delusions? I cant imagine actually believing I am Star Trek captain, but I sure can believe someone else do. I just cant imagine how that must feel/look like inside that someones head.
At the beginning, you know you're mad. I remember the first hour or so, I was thinking "no fucking way this is real". But it feels so real that you quickly stop believing anyone who says otherwise and you mark them as the enemies. Your head keeps inventing reasons why is it real and the voices keep explaining it - in some cases it's religious experiences, in my case it's hyper-advanced technology enabling telepathic communication.
I didn't think it's the Star Trek from movies, I just thought we somehow made it work in secret and now I'm on it too. Paranoid people aren't paranoid just so, they are paranoid because there is a brutal mismatch between their perception of reality and what people tell them.
At one point, in a different situation, I knew I'm in the middle of psychosis - and my voices told me all about super-agent-psychiatrists who are trying to help me by doing James Bond-style interventions. So yeah, you can simultaneously know you're right in the middle of it, and discuss the situation with your delusions, while thinking the delusions are real.
A hallmark feature of psychosis and schizophrenia is lack of "insight", meaning that the patient can't recognize that they are having delusions, nor the fact that they are suffering from the illness. The belief that you are a Star Trek captain feels as real as knocking on wood.
The illnesses simultaneously cause hallucinations that enforce delusions, and twist your belief systems so you pick up on the most insignificant details to support your delusions. Almost all patients end up believing that they are god, Star Trek captains, or stalked by a government agency, because this best explains their (hallucinatory) experiences. For example, if you hear voices in your head, the patient can't usually understand it as an illness, but has to explain it in some other way, so you end up with CIA/god/whatever beaming voices into your head.
I've been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder when I was in my early twenties.
I've had several full blown psychotic episodes and been hospitalised several times.
Fortunately there was one medication - Amisulpride - that kept me stable enough to be able to have a professional career, though not without a lot of struggling and sacrifice.
I know what psychosis is and honestly, this avatar therapy feels a bit like bullshit to me.
When in psychosis, you are not listening to your voices - you are your voices and they can command you to do things you do not want to do. You are not in control of you consciousness.
There is hope though. A revolution in mental illnessis going on - check the metabolic mind site for more info - https://metabolicmind.org
Many other people have substantially improved because of metabolic therapy and there are dozens of random control trials going on with very promising early results.
There are ever more cases of successful treatment via metabolic therapy
Under the risk of being unpopular, it's my responsibility to let people know about this treatment option and bring hope to those who suffer from this terrible illness.
I don't question the good faith of the researcher but i think we should prioritise what works - and there is a growing volume of evidence that metabolic therapies work.
I take back the bullshit qualification though - it was a mistake on my part.
Interestingly this idea of helping people to talk to the voices in their head is not new. The basis for IFS therapy (which emerged in the 80s) actively teaches people to have dialogue with their inner "parts". It is becoming one of the gold-standard therapies for CPTSD, anxiety, and a range of other trauma related conditions.
The core discovery of the therapy is that the human mind has an inherent multiplicity. Once you accept that and go from there, the rest of the technique emerges naturally. It's really quite amazing. I highly recommend the book "No bad parts" by Dr Richard Schwartz, the discoverer of the technique.
What really excites me here is the use of a virtual avatar that personifies the voice. That is really new to me and I can see all sorts of possibilities to link with IFS.
Most schools of psychotherapy are equally effective, with the very notable exception of CBT for anxiety disorders. For most patients, the school of psychotherapy only matters insofar as they buy into it - nearly all of the therapeutic benefit is totally independent of the particular methodology or even the training and experience of the therapist. Even therapeutic approaches specifically designed to be pure placebo turn out to be just as effective as everything else. If IFS or Freudian psychoanalysis are metaphors for how we think, then they just aren't useful metaphors.
I would tend to agree with you here, with a caveat.
All these theories are describing the same underlying phenomenon so there is a "blind men and the elephant" effect. They also substantially build on one another
The caveat is that what really sets these models apart is how they propose to navigate the mind. This is where I believe IFS stands out. But it would take a much longer comment to explain that. Maybe it's worth writing an article about.
I've come to the conclusion that psychodynamic therapy is harmful for neurotic depressives like myself. Dwelling in my neuroses enhances them.
I wish there was a triage psychiatrist I could see that would help me identify the most effective type of therapy for my situation and then help me find a therapist.
This reminds me of a book I loved and still love, which was mentioned recently in another topic: Peter Watts - Blindsight. Hard sf with a bit of everything, including this multiplicity you mention.
See also Genpo Roshi's Big Mind, Big Heart which has one assume the persona of various aspects of their mind and attempt to carry out a dialogue as that aspect.
>As much as 8 percent of the population reports experiencing auditory hallucinations on a regular basis (13 percent hear them at least occasionally), compared to just 1 percent who are diagnosed with schizophrenia. https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/articl...
Hearing voices may be a symptom of something serious, but not always. As long as a person's grasp of reality is not in danger and voices don't stress out people, they can live with them and not even seek help. Not all people hear negative voices. Older lonely people have been known to say that voices keep them company.
> voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the U.S., the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luh...
Maybe the most famous case of a high-functioning outlier was Carl Jung. He hallucinated complete persons since childhood ,visually and everything. He discussed matters with them. In the end, he was able to get rid of them when he decided that they were not helpful anymore. It's easier to understand his weird theories and spirituality when you have read his autobiography. The guy was off the charts but not disabled by it.
> Maybe the most famous case of a high-functioning outlier was Carl Jung. He hallucinated completely people since childhood ,visually and everything.
It's maybe easier to understand his focus on individuation, or integration of the component parts of the psyche into a cohesive whole, in light of this. Jung draws from esoteric alchemy and other related traditions (see his work: Psychology and Alchemy) which, instead of viewing the mind as a singular, monolithic entity, prefer conceiving of it as an organism comprised of many parts - Hermetic Qabalah being one such example.
Looks like a really promising approach to therapy as well.. right up until they said they'd stop voicing it by a skilled psychologist and get an AI to do it, while putting the psychotic person into VR instead of over a screen.. that was a big 'fuck no'.
I see where they're coming from, though: right now you have to be certified on this very specific program, meaning you only get the benefits if you have access to one of the 38 people currently trained for it in the UK.
I would definitely want a professional to be in charge but, as the article itself points out, "Joe recently went back to his GP in search of help with his anxiety (...) The GP put him on a waiting list for NHS talking therapy, and warned that he could be in for a very long wait". Given how bad access to mental health resources is I may be willing to take "a community nurse, or a nursing assistant" now over "wait several months for a chance at a doctor who may not be the right fit for you".
I wouldn't dream of allowing an AI to roam free - as the article says patients can get more psychotic and arguably "you should end it" could very well be part of the training data. But if the AI suggests lines that a trained human can oversee... then maybe?
I think your proposal of AI therapists with human overseers would be okay if we were able to develop some kind of metrication and monitoring of the human oversight portion.
Without that control, what would inevitably happen would be that the highly-scalable part of the system (the AI) would be scaled, and the difficult-to-scale part of the system (the human) would not. We would fairly quickly end up with a situation where a single human was "overseeing" hundreds or thousands of AI conversations, at which point the oversight would become ineffective.
I don't know how to metricate and monitor human oversight of AI systems, but it feels like there are already other systems (like Air Traffic Control) where we manage to do similar things.
If they are going to get creative, perhaps apply the constructive effects of some mind altering drugs? Under AI shaman supervision of course!
I have never heard voices, but experienced two forms of dissociation for a while after a trauma. Nothing was real, was one of them. Couldn’t trust any scene I was in or the chair I was going to sit on. Unending vertigo and feelings of experiencing a fiction.
I think it’s absolutely weird that the proctor is voicing the avatar
I’m imagining some Unreal Engine Skyrim deity on screen being voiced by my therapist, acting with a vocoder. Like, c’mon.
Definitely train a computer to do this part, generate your psychosis demon and have it really say the abstractions you described. Theyre already shockingly scary in realism when theyre not prompted to be.
A VR headset might be a little too immersive and triggering
Yes you definitely want a possibly suicidal person to be talking to a "AI" engine who talks back with the avatar they normally hear. (This was sarcasm in case you missed it)
One of my favorite speculative hypotheses is Bicameral Mind Theory, which asserts that something like schizophrenia was relatively common until relatively recently, about 3000 BC. It argues that it was relatively normal for humans to hear voices in their head directing them. So when we read religious texts about the gods commanding so-and-so to do such-and-such, it wasn't just a spiritual metaphor, but an actual voice people heard in their heads and interpreted as higher powers.
In buddhism (I'm not a specialist by any means), I think awareness and consciousness is a central concept too. "The light of awareness", "awakening" is seen as holy. I really think that awareness is essential to enabling us to have hope to improve and specially understand our life and our problems; besides making us more connected, participating in reality. I like Thich Nhat Hanh's saying of a "serene encounter with reality" he finds through meditation. Different, each in its own poetry, ways of saying the similar things.
And I think the profound realization and awareness of the reality of others can bring no other outcome than compassion. That's why I think awareness is extremely important too for living in a society and enable living in a civilization.
Humans migrated to the Americas by at the latest 8900 BC when the land bridge disappeared, and we have evidence for migrations way before that. There's no way any kind of genetic change that occurred around 3000 BC could have made it to the Americas, and the indigenous population does not seem to exhibit such divergent modes of thought. They are essentially modern humans. So this date needs to be pushed way back.
I’d speculatively propose the reverse: that a change occurred that led to our suppressing these “voices” to our subconscious, where they are still present but suppressed below the threshold of conscious awareness. Interestingly, in parts of the world, these voices persist (eg Ethiopia where a high percentage of people report regularly hearing voices in their heads). Also interestingly, this book you mention was one of David Bowie’s favourites - yes, he of the multiple pop personas.
The two hemispheres started to communicate (better) so wouldn't feel each other as strangers anymore. Or at least that was my understanding, in very simple words and without asking any AI :)
The phenomenon of auditory hallucinations often attributed to schizophrenics in modern day, was, far from being an aberrant condition, in fact the normal every day condition of ancient bicameral man. There was no concept of "I" or "free will;" the gods merely issued their auditory commands, and man obeyed, not having any choice in the matter. This was simply every day life for the bicameral man, who lived in a community of other "like-minded" beings that also experienced similar auditory hallucinations, often commands or admonishments, from the same god-king ruling the civilization.
Neurologically Jaynes locates these voices, and even defines gods to be those particular neurological phenomena located in the right hemisphere of the brain, that communicated its preverbal judgements to "man," located in the left hemisphere, which interpreted such judgments as speech:
The gods were in no sense "figments of the imagination" of anyone. They *were* man's volition. They occupied his nervous system,
probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated
speech which then "told" the man what to do.
Several factors were attributed to its decline: the development of written language localizing a disembodied voice that was once omnipresent into a stele or rock carving; the emergence of trade and the contact of other societies, governed by different god-kings, leading to proto-theories of mind meant to explain the differing behaviour of the rival civilization; selective pressures against the viability of such "bicameral theocracies;" the development of free will. Reasons abound, but what followed was the collapse of bicameral mind and the disappearance of the voices, substantiated by various observations of ancient cultural artifacts: hypnotic induction of trance at the Oracle of Delphi, the practices of divination and omen reading, the production of artistic works in Mesopotamia depicting empty thrones and absent gods, or the crying out to the gods for their assistance and return, as in The Babylonian Theodicy, or the Psalms. All this in order to "re-awaken" the voices of gods that had once dispensed wisdom and now fell dormant with the emergence of modern, self-conscious, free-willed, individualistic man.
It's really a non-scientific idea, in the Popplerian sense. How would you debunk it? How would you confirm it? It's not in that class of idea.
A lot of people have been taught to read that as "therefore it's false" or "therefore it's true" or "therefore it's unimportant", but really all it means is that it is not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking. That, and nothing more. Many things are not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking that are true and false and important and unimportant and everything else.
Richard Dawkins called Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between”
This reminds me of mirror box therapy for phantom limb syndrome. Amputees sometimes feel intense pain in the limbs that they have lost. This is measurable activity in the brain. Unfortunately all of the feedback mechanisms for that activity have been removed with the limb. By showing people a mirrored version of their remaining limb. And then stimulating that limb in a way that would remove pain say massage or touch or unclenching a cramped clenched phantom hand, the patient gets the feedback to the part of their brain via their visual system that there's nothing wrong with that limb. This activates inhibitory circuits that would otherwise be inaccessible.
In this therapy a combination of visual and audio input as well as external control over the behavior of the Voice allows for a feedback mechanism which does not exist otherwise.
This concept has been explored in the "The Outer Limits (1995)" episode 5 of season 2: "Mind Over Matter"
"A doctor uses a virtual reality A.I. device that gives him direct access inside the human mind to enter the mind of a colleague he deeply cares about and help her after she's hit by a car and slips into a coma. Things go horribly wrong."
Readit News
Never do anything to confirm a paranoid person's psychosis unless you have total control of the situation and a psychiatrist supervision. Never try to peace them by saying unrealistic things, you never know what's going on in their head that you just confirmed. My GF tried to reassure me by saying she will be with me in 15 minutes, but she was 100km away and I thought "okay well that makes all of this real, let's do it".
https://youtu.be/7csXfSRXmZ0?si=GT6zn_Sytcfw011H
https://youtu.be/7csXfSRXmZ0
https://www.mhfa.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/MHFA_Psyc...
We were shown this video in our MHFA certification class for discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7cMXce5j40
Or do you mean you called her becouse you kinda knew you were mad and wanted her to also say it?
So it didn't postpone anything, maybe if she had given a realistic ETA (or just said "I'm coming, wait for me") it would have worked though.
It's very difficult to know what to do in these situations though, I've been on the side of that girlfriend and you just can't have a full understand of what's going on in the head of the other person, everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines.
It didn't postpone anything. I called her because I knew I'm going mad and wanted to confirm if it's true or not. Of course I didn't word it this way, though. What she said confirmed the delusion, nearly got me killed and even though I didn't jump, I got lost in the city, hurt myself, nearly hurt others, until someone called the police few hours later.
I didn't think it's the Star Trek from movies, I just thought we somehow made it work in secret and now I'm on it too. Paranoid people aren't paranoid just so, they are paranoid because there is a brutal mismatch between their perception of reality and what people tell them.
At one point, in a different situation, I knew I'm in the middle of psychosis - and my voices told me all about super-agent-psychiatrists who are trying to help me by doing James Bond-style interventions. So yeah, you can simultaneously know you're right in the middle of it, and discuss the situation with your delusions, while thinking the delusions are real.
The illnesses simultaneously cause hallucinations that enforce delusions, and twist your belief systems so you pick up on the most insignificant details to support your delusions. Almost all patients end up believing that they are god, Star Trek captains, or stalked by a government agency, because this best explains their (hallucinatory) experiences. For example, if you hear voices in your head, the patient can't usually understand it as an illness, but has to explain it in some other way, so you end up with CIA/god/whatever beaming voices into your head.
Deleted Comment
I've had several full blown psychotic episodes and been hospitalised several times.
Fortunately there was one medication - Amisulpride - that kept me stable enough to be able to have a professional career, though not without a lot of struggling and sacrifice.
I know what psychosis is and honestly, this avatar therapy feels a bit like bullshit to me.
When in psychosis, you are not listening to your voices - you are your voices and they can command you to do things you do not want to do. You are not in control of you consciousness.
There is hope though. A revolution in mental illnessis going on - check the metabolic mind site for more info - https://metabolicmind.org
I talk about my experience in my blog - https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/finding-hope-after-decades-of...
Many other people have substantially improved because of metabolic therapy and there are dozens of random control trials going on with very promising early results.
There are ever more cases of successful treatment via metabolic therapy
Under the risk of being unpopular, it's my responsibility to let people know about this treatment option and bring hope to those who suffer from this terrible illness.
I take back the bullshit qualification though - it was a mistake on my part.
The core discovery of the therapy is that the human mind has an inherent multiplicity. Once you accept that and go from there, the rest of the technique emerges naturally. It's really quite amazing. I highly recommend the book "No bad parts" by Dr Richard Schwartz, the discoverer of the technique.
What really excites me here is the use of a virtual avatar that personifies the voice. That is really new to me and I can see all sorts of possibilities to link with IFS.
Perhaps just as some but not all of us are aphantasic, some but not all of us may think in the IFS way, or Jungian, or Freudian.
* from my comfortable armchair, don't read too much into this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy....
All these theories are describing the same underlying phenomenon so there is a "blind men and the elephant" effect. They also substantially build on one another
The caveat is that what really sets these models apart is how they propose to navigate the mind. This is where I believe IFS stands out. But it would take a much longer comment to explain that. Maybe it's worth writing an article about.
I wish there was a triage psychiatrist I could see that would help me identify the most effective type of therapy for my situation and then help me find a therapist.
Deleted Comment
Hearing voices may be a symptom of something serious, but not always. As long as a person's grasp of reality is not in danger and voices don't stress out people, they can live with them and not even seek help. Not all people hear negative voices. Older lonely people have been known to say that voices keep them company.
> voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the U.S., the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luh...
Maybe the most famous case of a high-functioning outlier was Carl Jung. He hallucinated complete persons since childhood ,visually and everything. He discussed matters with them. In the end, he was able to get rid of them when he decided that they were not helpful anymore. It's easier to understand his weird theories and spirituality when you have read his autobiography. The guy was off the charts but not disabled by it.
It's maybe easier to understand his focus on individuation, or integration of the component parts of the psyche into a cohesive whole, in light of this. Jung draws from esoteric alchemy and other related traditions (see his work: Psychology and Alchemy) which, instead of viewing the mind as a singular, monolithic entity, prefer conceiving of it as an organism comprised of many parts - Hermetic Qabalah being one such example.
Looks like a really promising approach to therapy as well.. right up until they said they'd stop voicing it by a skilled psychologist and get an AI to do it, while putting the psychotic person into VR instead of over a screen.. that was a big 'fuck no'.
I would definitely want a professional to be in charge but, as the article itself points out, "Joe recently went back to his GP in search of help with his anxiety (...) The GP put him on a waiting list for NHS talking therapy, and warned that he could be in for a very long wait". Given how bad access to mental health resources is I may be willing to take "a community nurse, or a nursing assistant" now over "wait several months for a chance at a doctor who may not be the right fit for you".
I wouldn't dream of allowing an AI to roam free - as the article says patients can get more psychotic and arguably "you should end it" could very well be part of the training data. But if the AI suggests lines that a trained human can oversee... then maybe?
Without that control, what would inevitably happen would be that the highly-scalable part of the system (the AI) would be scaled, and the difficult-to-scale part of the system (the human) would not. We would fairly quickly end up with a situation where a single human was "overseeing" hundreds or thousands of AI conversations, at which point the oversight would become ineffective.
I don't know how to metricate and monitor human oversight of AI systems, but it feels like there are already other systems (like Air Traffic Control) where we manage to do similar things.
I have never heard voices, but experienced two forms of dissociation for a while after a trauma. Nothing was real, was one of them. Couldn’t trust any scene I was in or the chair I was going to sit on. Unending vertigo and feelings of experiencing a fiction.
As a famous ex-newt once said: “I got better!”
I’m imagining some Unreal Engine Skyrim deity on screen being voiced by my therapist, acting with a vocoder. Like, c’mon.
Definitely train a computer to do this part, generate your psychosis demon and have it really say the abstractions you described. Theyre already shockingly scary in realism when theyre not prompted to be.
A VR headset might be a little too immersive and triggering
But as long as its supervised I think its better
I asked her once, decades later, how she coped with it all, and her answer still freaks me out sometimes.
She said she didn’t know she was a person who had choices, or could think about the situation she was in. She just did as she was expected to.
She’s in her 60s now and is far more in tune with her emotions, thoughts and feelings than I remember her when I was a kid.
She was virtually in catatonic autopilot most of her life, because no one encouraged her to think.
There's a quote from Helen Keller in this vein, after she was taught to communicate, though I can't find the full text:
"When the sun of consciousness first shone upon me, behold a miracle!"
In buddhism (I'm not a specialist by any means), I think awareness and consciousness is a central concept too. "The light of awareness", "awakening" is seen as holy. I really think that awareness is essential to enabling us to have hope to improve and specially understand our life and our problems; besides making us more connected, participating in reality. I like Thich Nhat Hanh's saying of a "serene encounter with reality" he finds through meditation. Different, each in its own poetry, ways of saying the similar things.
And I think the profound realization and awareness of the reality of others can bring no other outcome than compassion. That's why I think awareness is extremely important too for living in a society and enable living in a civilization.
Deleted Comment
I think you should read the above book.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Neurologically Jaynes locates these voices, and even defines gods to be those particular neurological phenomena located in the right hemisphere of the brain, that communicated its preverbal judgements to "man," located in the left hemisphere, which interpreted such judgments as speech:
Several factors were attributed to its decline: the development of written language localizing a disembodied voice that was once omnipresent into a stele or rock carving; the emergence of trade and the contact of other societies, governed by different god-kings, leading to proto-theories of mind meant to explain the differing behaviour of the rival civilization; selective pressures against the viability of such "bicameral theocracies;" the development of free will. Reasons abound, but what followed was the collapse of bicameral mind and the disappearance of the voices, substantiated by various observations of ancient cultural artifacts: hypnotic induction of trance at the Oracle of Delphi, the practices of divination and omen reading, the production of artistic works in Mesopotamia depicting empty thrones and absent gods, or the crying out to the gods for their assistance and return, as in The Babylonian Theodicy, or the Psalms. All this in order to "re-awaken" the voices of gods that had once dispensed wisdom and now fell dormant with the emergence of modern, self-conscious, free-willed, individualistic man.A lot of people have been taught to read that as "therefore it's false" or "therefore it's true" or "therefore it's unimportant", but really all it means is that it is not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking. That, and nothing more. Many things are not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking that are true and false and important and unimportant and everything else.
Deleted Comment
In this therapy a combination of visual and audio input as well as external control over the behavior of the Voice allows for a feedback mechanism which does not exist otherwise.
"A doctor uses a virtual reality A.I. device that gives him direct access inside the human mind to enter the mind of a colleague he deeply cares about and help her after she's hit by a car and slips into a coma. Things go horribly wrong."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667922/