Childhood hallucinations are surprisingly common – but why?
Childhood has long been championed as a time for make-believe, but recent research has found that another form of unreality - hallucinations - is more common in children than we previously imagined. For years, kids' accounts of seeing, hearing and experiencing things that weren't really there were considered to be part of the same invented world - an "overactive imagination"; a "fantasy world". The Alice in Wonderland approach, perhaps. But as it was recognised that hallucinations can be reliably identified in children, science has begun to look at why these illusory experiences are many times more common during our early years.
Hallucinations often reflect a bizarre, blurry version of our realities and because play is an everyday reality for children, the content can seem similar. Both can contain quirky characters, strange scenarios and inspire curious behaviour. One child described how he saw a wolf in the house, another that he had "Yahoos" living inside him that ate all his medicine. On the surface, these could just as easily be a child's whimsy, but genuine hallucinations have a very different flavour. "In play and make-believe, children are imagining," says Elena Garralda, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Imperial College London. "They do not have the actual perceptual experience of seeing and hearing." Another key difference, notes Garralda, is that "hallucinations feel imposed and children cannot exercise a direct control over them".
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