DELUSIONS AND HALLUCINATIONS: THE ROLE OF METACOGNITION

As delusions and hallucinations express the detachment from reality characteristic of major mental disorders, they are the core features of psychosis. Since Kraepelin’s works (1904) those symptoms was used to identify one of the most severe mental illness’: schizophrenia. When entering the schizophrenic Lebensform, delusions and hallucinations assume peculiar traits: the former specifing in bizarre themes , the latter becoming voices which inhabit and violate the individual intimacy. In this paper, I’ll try to show that the best way to investigate these symptoms is to highlight their shared mechanisms, focussing on metacognitive factors which form and maintain them. When examining these factors, the believes seem to be weaken in both cases, even if considering auditory hallucinations as pathologies of belief could seem counterintuitive. Voices don’t seem to belong to the area of believes but to that of perception. Nontheless, analizing the most recent literature on auditory hallucinations, one can notice that a growing space is given to top down processes (believes and expectations on own cognitive processes that would concur to feed and maintain the symptoms), rather than to bottom up processes (brain damages or neurological deficits that would cause psychotic symptoms, e.g. anomalous perceptual experiences).

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