How common are visual hallucinations in Schizophrenics?
Mueser and colleagues (1990) examined 117 DSM-III-R schizophrenic or schizoaffective disorder patients and reported a prevalence of 16% for visual hallucinations. Interestingly, they found that the global severity of illness was higher in patients with schizophrenia and visual hallucinations. Teeple and colleagues (2009) observe that this finding makes sense of the widely varying estimates of prevalence of visual hallucinations in schizophrenic patients, since patients with more severe illness might be expected to experience more visual hallucinations than those with less severe illness.