Six minutes as a schizophrenic

CALHOUN COUNTY, Mich. (NEWSCHANNEL 3) - Calhoun County deputies are experiencing a unique and very powerful training tool.

It's called Mindstorm and it takes a person through six minutes of a schizophrenic morning.

You hear all the voices talking to you, you smell the pungent smells. You feel the breezes.

It's an amazing tool the department is using to help deputies and others understand what those patients go through. They face them every day and say the training is invaluable.

"Listening to some of the folks coming out they have experienced the sites, the sounds, the smells. They have a different perception, a different empathy I think for what they've seen and what they've learned," said Sheriff Allen L. Byam of the Calhoun County Sheriff's Department.

Mindstorm is a virtual hallucination created by Janssen, a division of Johnson and Johnson.

It was developed by a psychiatrist and hundreds of interviews from those suffering from the brain disease.