Hallucinations as Thoughts Turned Up: The VitaModo View

In the VitaModo method, Dr. Andris Saulitis deliberately uses the word “hallucinations” to highlight continuity: there is no gulf between an ordinary thought and a hallucination — only a scale of intensity. This angle, “why it happens,” explains the phenomenon from inside the logic of thinking itself, rather than as something otherworldly and incomprehensible.

A thought that becomes audible

The doctor offers the image of a “mental temperature.” An ordinary thought is the norm. But when the intensity of the impulse rises “like 36.9, 37,” the thoughts become so strong that a person feels they can hear them. And when the “temperature” climbs higher still, the thoughts “acquire an owner” — the brain produces an interpretation, and the person perceives the voice as belonging to someone specific, and even starts talking with it.

“What is a hallucination — it is the same thoughts you experience, only when their intensity keeps rising.”

From neurosis to psychosis — one line

The same logic explains the whole spectrum. When thoughts “wind us up” and we cannot free ourselves from them — that is neurosis. Situational neurosis arises when someone hurts us and the thoughts about it start spinning. If the pressure does not stop, the state ceases to be situational and grows further — toward psychosis. At some point a crossover happens, and neurosis turns into psychosis.

“This is already a mild neurosis, when you’re doing something and those thoughts are spinning in parallel.”

Genetics and environment: why the form differs

The doctor stresses: heredity matters, but the environment proves decisive — epigenetics and neuroplasticity. He gives the image of two twins with identical genetics: one, in a favorable environment, grows into a genius; the other, in an unfavorable one, into schizophrenia turning into deficit. Which form the rising intensity takes depends on genetic constitution, but the process is triggered and fed by environmental factors — the pregnancy, the mother’s attitude, love and care in childhood.

Why it was explained differently before

The method reminds us: thousands of years ago people did not recognize the very phenomenon of mental disorder. They interpreted these phenomena as best they could in their time — hence the many religious and other explanations. Today the same experience can be described as a rising intensity of thinking, rather than as contact with otherworldly “owners” of voices.

Why the brain can’t tell delusion from fact

A key part of the method’s view: by default the brain has no “immune program” that automatically distinguishes delusion from fact and norm. If a person is insistently told that mushrooms grow with their roots upward, the brain accepts it by default. That is why understanding how thinking works is itself prevention: Dr. Saulitis calls VitaModo an institute for the prevention of mental disorders, and the one thing that is “not nonsense” is to truly improve mental health and form a healthy environment around oneself.

Practice

A self-observation checklist for your “mental temperature” (strictly from the material’s logic):

1. Notice the intrusive thought and name it as a thought, not as yourself — “this is a thought, not me.”
2. Rate its intensity: just spinning in the background, or already felt as a relentless, unshakable impulse.
3. Find the source situation: who or what “wound up” this thought (e.g., a person who hurt you).
4. Ask: is this a fact, or something being pushed onto me as the norm — is there any verifiable basis here?
5. Shift focus onto a healthy environment around you — that is prevention according to the method.