Sound and Vision: A Collaboration Between Service-users, Artists and the Public to Explore the Lived Experience of Hallucinations

Sound and Vision will pair local artists with patients who have had hallucinations to create art pieces that represent their hallucinatory experiences. Patients with diagnoses of schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease will be invited to take part in participating National Health Service (NHS) clinics, to capture and compare a wide range of hallucinatory experiences. Patients will meet with artists on several occasions who will then develop the piece, which may be a painting, drawing, or other media that the artist and service-user jointly select.

Completed artworks will be the centrepiece for an exhibition at United Kingdom (UK) science festivals and a digital (on-line) presentation. The exhibition will be accompanied by researchers explaining the brain science of hallucinations, recordings of patients and artists describing their experience with hallucinations and the process of developing the artworks, booklets cataloguing the exhibition, and art materials available for artistic expression of their own experiences. A digital compendium of the artworks and supporting material will be publicly available alongside the opportunity to complete an online survey exploring the themes of the artworks and collecting information on personal experiences. The objectives are to engage the public in an appreciation of the experience of hallucinations and their prevalence across many common mental health and neurodegenerative disorders, as well as an experience many people will share without ever being diagnosed. The exhibition will also encourage the public to share their own experiences through the online questionnaires creating a platform to begin to improve the understanding of the diversity of hallucination-like experiences in the general population.