Mental Health World Conference 2026

Abstract

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are among the most distressing symptoms experienced by individuals with schizophrenia and are strongly associated with functional impairment and recovery challenges. Although numerous qualitative studies have explored the lived experiences and coping strategies of individuals experiencing AVH, the structural patterns underlying these coping experiences remain insufficiently understood. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) offer new opportunities to systematically analyze qualitative data and identify latent semantic structures within complex experiential narratives. This study aimed to explore semantic patterns in coping experiences related to auditory verbal hallucinations using an AI assisted clustering approach. A secondary qualitative data integration design was employed. Qualitative studies addressing coping experiences associated with AVH were identified through a PRISMA guided screening process, resulting in 23 eligible studies selected from an initial pool of 807 records. Participant quotations describing coping experiences were extracted and compiled into a textual dataset. Sentence embeddings were generated using Sentence BERT to represent the semantic meaning of individual quotations. Semantic similarities between quotations were calculated, and agglomerative hierarchical clustering was applied to identify meaningful semantic groupings. Through this analysis, five distinct coping clusters were identified embodied distress, self concept formation, active coping, therapeutic control, and social context. These clusters illustrate diverse experiential dimensions of coping with auditory hallucinations and reveal structured patterns within previously fragmented qualitative accounts. The findings suggest that AI assisted semantic analysis can provide a novel methodological approach for integrating qualitative evidence and identifying latent patterns in patient experiences. This approach may contribute to a deeper understanding of hallucination coping processes and support the development of recovery oriented and person-centered mental health interventions.