JST CREST 2023–
Tojisha-Kenkyu on Auditory and Visual Hallucinations
From Co-creation to Co-delusion
Building VR/AR expressions of auditory and visual hallucinations together with the people who experience them. What the field taught us is that dialogue is opened up not by “accurate reproduction” but by the room to imagine together — “from co-creation to co-delusion.”
Bethel House (Urakawa, Hokkaido) is a community where people living with mental illness have spent forty years cultivating "tojisha-kenkyu" — a practice in which they research their own symptoms and struggles for themselves. Rather than experts curing patients, the people concerned become the experts on their own difficulties. This is a practice-based research project in which I joined that community as an engineer.
Background
Overseas, there is a treatment called "avatar therapy," in which auditory hallucinations are given form as avatars on a screen so that patients can talk with them, and the initial idea was to bring something like it to Japan. But as I talked with people at Bethel, I came to realize that hallucinated voices do not always take human form — and above all, that people's interest lay less in "treating myself" than in the community: "I want to share this experience with my peers and my family." The one-on-one treatment model of the consultation room was not something we could simply carry into this place.
Research Question
What does it bring to the practice of tojisha-kenkyu when the experiential worlds of auditory and visual hallucinations are given form in VR/AR, and people look at them and talk about them together with their community?
Methods
We interview people who experience auditory or visual hallucinations, then try to recreate their experiential worlds in VR or AR (technology that overlays digital imagery onto real scenery). Then we look at what has been made together with the person and the community, and talk about it again. We have run this workshop repeatedly at Bethel House.
Findings
Even prototypes built from no more than an hour of interviews were often accepted by the person themselves — "that's pretty close," "it feels like this." The experience of hallucinations does not seem to have a single "correct answer"; it has a story-like softness that can be shaped together through dialogue. You cannot build what you do not know, so you try to know in order to build. But you can never know everything, so you allow yourself a small leap of imagination. An editor gave this practice a name: "from co-creation to co-delusion." The technology does not make the symptoms go away. Still, when your experiential world takes visible form and can be looked at together with someone else, a new kind of telling emerges there.