Automatic word processing hypnosis and cognitive therapy for psychosis: a case report.

Hallucinations are often perceived as auditory and visual experiences emanating from outside the mind and it is this belief by patients that is a powerfully convincing factor in maintaining psychotic symptoms and accompanying distress. One of the main tasks of cognitive therapy for psychosis is to help the person recognize that the hallucinations emerge from within their own mind for some meaningful reason. A change in meaning can change a person's affective and behavioral responses to hallucinatory phenomena. Automatic Word Processing (AWP) hypnosis is a novel way to help a person realize that the hallucinations they perceive as external and distressful are really internally generated phenomena often based upon his or her life experiences. The case presented here illustrates how AWP hypnosis helped a 13-year-old girl access the internal material that shaped the form and content of visual and auditory hallucinations and interfered with her social and academic functioning.