That sounds frightening. Fortunately I never had those. I had exclusively auditory hallucinations (people conversing mostly).
How often do you hallucinate? Is it all day long? Do they come mainly in times of stress or in deep depressions? If the depression is your dominant complaint and the hallucinations are secondary, then your diagnosis is probably correct. However, if it is the other way around you may have been misdiagnosed. You could have schizoaffective disorder or mild schizophrenia (Actually "mild" schizophrenia is a misnomer, since all forms of schizophrenia are extremely painful). However, there are some people with the so-called "milder" forms that respond very well to medication and stress reduction, and may only have flareups in times of crisis.
If you truly have MDD with psychotic features, then you might respond well to a an antidepressant combined with an antipsychotic (to control symptoms quickly and prevent relapse).
Are you on any medications now?
Try to keep your stress down as much as possible. Psychotic depression is caused by high levels of cortisol and cortisol is a stress hormone, I believe. From my experience there is a direct correlation between stress and hallucinations.
Not very much since I was on antipsychotics and one antidepressant. my sense of smell is sometimes confused with reality because when I do hallucinate I'm lost not knowing whether theyre real or not. They also make me feel worthless and helpless when in a slope of depression.
Sometimes I freak out because I smell gas in my room. Gas or something burning. I run around the house searching for signs but usually nothing is wrong.
Once again, I blame my bad eye-sight. I see so badly that my strong sense is my olfact. I smell everything, miles from my house. But sometimes, I'm allucinating.
I don't smell things but I sometimes get a weird taste of something in my mouth. It started when I was first taking Prozac and I'd randomly taste chemically products like soap or bubblebath, sometimes toothpaste. It was usually when I was about to take a bite of a sandwich or something and it'd make the food taste horrible. I stopped taking the Prozac months ago but I still get the weird tastes in my mouth sometimes, which is strange :roll
I remember learning about this in a Psychology lecture. 'Scent' and 'taste' hallucinations are called auras and are experienced by epileptics before or during a seizure. Maybe people with anxiety have similar chemical imbalances in the brain to those with epilepsy or something, might explain the shared symptom?
i once read about a case in an abnormal pscyh textbook where a women who had depression or some kind of psychosis always had the taste of tomatoes in her mouth then the doc or nurse with suggested she try eating a tomato and when she did the feeling instantly went away.
uhh i guess it's not very helpful with your situation but just found that interesting.
I heard their could be many causes/reasons for smelling perceptions being distorted. Im sure Im not a hopeless case with a brain tumor or hopefully not some ghost haunting my environment. :um
I don't really get these odor hallucinations, I get visual hallucinations all the time. Like I will be doing something then I will turn around to see a place and my mind thinks I saw someone there then I turn back to what I was doing and turn back again to the place and there is nothing there. Another example would be like, sometimes I am doing some stuff while working (mostly stocking items) then I make a U turn to enter the next aisle and I stop suddenly cause I think I see someone I am going to crash into but there is nobody.
I get these all the time, I just ignore them. I will look at something, my mind will think I saw my friend, a person who I know that was there 5 minutes ago, or sometimes I just think I seen someone doing something and then when I look back again there is nothing.
At times I have smelled some kind of soda, like Coke or Pepsi, also pizza, and peanut butter all while in the privacy of my big rig driving down the highway or in the privacy of my home without having any of the aforementioned foods within "nose shot."
I always thought that I had been smelling the food that a friend was consuming at that moment in time. I have an active imagination.
I have also heard a chorus of singers singing for split seconds at a time more than once in my life. It actually shocked me and made me turn my head suddenly trying to place the origin of the sound.
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