At the heart of this study is a wish to better understand experiences of hallucinations and delusions in young people. Hallucinations are sensory and perceptual experiences that involve hearing, seeing, smelling or feeling things that aren’t there and delusions refer thoughts and beliefs that aren’t true, so much so that someone who has them can’t be convinced that they aren’t true. Over the past twenty years, research with children and adolescents in the general population (i.e. recruited from schools and communities and not from mental health services) has revealed that up to 1 in 5 young people may experience some form of hallucination or delusions during their childhood or adolescent years. For most young people, these experiences stop of their own accord and, for many, they are not an indication of any underlying mental health issues or a cause of concern. However, for others, they do seem to be related to their emotional and mental health and they put some young people at risk for developing a range of mental health issues when they are adults, including experiencing depression, feeling suicidal or making a suicide attempt and, for a small minority, developing a psychotic illness.
A number of researchers have been looking at the relationship between hallucination and delusions and experiences of early life stress and traumatic childhood experiences. That research has shown that young people who experience early life stress or trauma - for example, growing up in poverty, experiencing childhood abuse, being bullied in childhood - are at greater risk of experiencing hallucinations and delusions. This project wants to advance our understanding of how and why it is that this relationship exists by looking at multiple aspects of a young person's experience (their subjective views about themselves, their lives and their experiences of hallucinations and delusions, their mental health, their neurocognitive abilities, their stress response and the structure of their brains). It is hope that, by looking at the interplay between early life stress and hallucinations and delusions in this multi-dimensional way, this project will reveal new insights and generate new knowledge about how and why some young people who experience hallucinations and delusions are at higher risk for poorer outcomes in their early adult years.
Findings from this study are important for society because they could help, not only to identify those children and adolescents who are at high risk for poor outcomes later in life, but to identify targets for meaningful early intervention to reduce and minimise that risk.
