Symptoms of AIWS was first published by Dr. John Todd, a British psychiatrist, in 1955 when many of his patients with severe migraines showed similarities in distorted reality perception (Cau, 1999). Todd classified and documented these commonalities between his patients as a single group of symptoms closely associated with some individuals who experience severe migraines and epilepsy (Todd, 1955). With this in mind, the most prevalent and notable symptoms documented in his paper were instances of body distortion where his patients felt as if their entire bodies grew or shrunk multiples times their normal body size. Some reported feeling as if they bodies were expanding or contracting within a confined space, or that their bodies were being
"Dr. John Todd noted [similar] hallucinations in [Alice in Wonderland] a variety of states... of epilepsy [and] schizophrenia" (Stewart). Psychiatrist Dr. John Todd connected the mind and symptoms of the main character Alice in Alice in Wonderland to the mental illness of Schizophrenia by looking at the common symptoms of people who suffer from this disease. Those symptoms are paralleled in Alice's trip to Wonderland through the hallucinations mentioned by Dr. Todd. Alice has many symptoms of a paranoid schizophrenic because of everything she does in Wonderland that is not normal to the world of reality. These strange things include shrinking and growing potions, talking animals and bugs, and the weird world around her. The strange occurrences are the initial key to figuring out her medical condition. Schizophrenia is a brain disorder that affects the way a person acts, thinks, and even their idea of reality. People with schizophrenia often have a different way of seeing the world. People who are commonly schizophrenic speak in strange or confusing ways, see things that don’t exist, and have unusual hallucinations. These hallucinations the characters experience are believed to follow the five senses. The five senses are touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste. The senses make the patient think the hallucinations are real when in reality the world only exist in the person's mind. Alice
Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat’ in 1985, it contains the bizarre, unique and extraordinary cases Sacks encountered as a neurologist. This book report is going to evaluate and include Dr. Sacks conclusions on the case studies recorded in ‘Part One: Losses’. ‘Losses’ covers 9 neurological disorders which are characterised by a ‘loss’ of some kind.
Summary: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks is a collection of cases and studies of patients with bizarre neurological disorders. The neurological disorders discussed include examples of deficits, excesses, reminiscence, and the "world of the simple". Neurologist Oliver Sacks discusses the stories of his patients and patients of other neurologists while appealing to logos, ethos, and pathos. Throughout the text there is a fair balance between logos, ethos, and pathos.
Salzman (2000) describes the journey of Sister John, a nun at the Carmelite convent in Los Angeles. She experiences headaches that develop into deep spiritual episodes, which her doctor later informs her, are the symptoms of her recurring seizures. Sister John has temporal-lobe epilepsy and her doctor explains that it, “tend[s] to be more psychological” (Salzman, 2000, p.68). Sister John’s spiritual episodes were presumably caused by her medical condition.
The first known case of Exploding Head Syndrome was described by Silas Weir Mitchell, an American doctor. He published a paper called “On Some of the Disorders of Sleep” in the Virginia Medical Monthly in 1876. He describes a patient identified as “Mr. V” and his experiences of noises that sounded like a gun being triggered, a bell being sounded, and a guitar being broken with a twang-like noise. A Welsh psychiatrist named Sir Robert Armstrong-Jones described many of his patients experiencing nightmares that they described as a “snapping of the brain” in 1920. A neurologist named John M.S Pearce published an article in the 1988 journal of Lancet called “Exploding Head Syndrome”. In the article he explains the symptoms of 10 patients who all
The delusion is mostly common in patients diagnosed with neurodegenerative diseases; such as Alzheimer’s disease (2% - 30%) [8],
Doctor Norma also mentioned that his own mother had died from the same disordered and he could not have saved her from the same that he was, having lots of “chronic sleep problems and fluctuation” in thinking in which mental acuity comes and goes; and vision hallucination, often of animals, children or miniature people. I could not imaging a human being having to face with such difficulty for him to have false sensory perception and its also difficulty for his family to watch him endure such agony and pain. That is pure suffering, its like having a battle with yourself, who is there to keep you safe from your own
After an attack with hysterical and epileptic symptoms lasting fifty hours, Louis V.’s memory was erased until just before the incident and his personality changed. Myers wrote, ‘his character had become violent, greedy, and quarrelsome, and his tastes were radically changed.’ The patient’s new personality was different from his personality before his epileptic attack. Myers made the point that hysterical cases were ‘cases where there is no actual traceable injury to either hemisphere.’ In such cases, neither side or hemisphere of the brain has an injury that can explain the changes in personality. There seemed to be great discussion about the differences between the right and left hemisphere of the brain. Myers wrote that in Louis V.’s case, if his right hemisphere were inhibited so he could not act in a natural way, ‘the high qualities of character remain, like the power of speech.’ However, if his left hemisphere were inhibited, Louis V. became sinister, exhibiting physical movements ‘through nervous arrangements which have reached a lower degree of evolution.’ While it was common to find such evolution regression after a cerebral injury, the person would not
They are vivid and clear, with the full force and impact of normal perceptions, and not under voluntary control. Hallucinations include auditory voices telling them to do things or warning them about something. Some patients report feeling like their arms or legs feel foreign. Another reported experience of distortions of oneself is feeling one’s body as an object rather than an inhabited aspect of selfhood, thinking others can read their thoughts or their thoughts are being spoken out loud. Sometimes unrelated words are linked together, for example, hamburger mountain time sleep, which is part of the incoherent speech. Emotional distortions could cause one to laugh when a friend dies or have other inappropriate emotional responses to situations. Many sufferers of schizophrenia are not aware of their illness altogether. This is known as anosognosia or “no disease knowledge” in Greek. There are also negative symptoms which account for a portion of the morbidity of the disease. Two negative symptoms are particularly prominent in schizophrenia: diminished emotional expression and avolition. Diminished emotional expression includes reductions in the expression of emotions in the face, eye contact, intonation of speech (prosody), and movements of the hand, head, and face that normally give an emotional
Hammeke, T.A. McQuillen, M.P. Cohen, B.A. (1983) Musical Hallucinations associated with acquired deafness. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry, 46, 570-572
A hallucination is defined as a sensory perception in the absence of an externally generated stimulus (4). They are different from illusions in that in an illusion an external object actually exists and is perceived, but is misinterpreted by the individual (4). Main forms of hallucinations are be visual, auditory, and olfactory, but since we have been discussing vision and interpretation of reality lately this paper will focus only on those that are visual. And I will attempt through the examination of two different types of visual hallucinations - release hallucinations and those experienced by schizophrenics - to make an argument for brain equals behavior.
The purpose of this study was to identify whether Abnormal Bodily Experiences (ABEs) could be a potential early marker of developing schizophrenia, contribute research and findings to assist in early diagnosis of schizophrenia, and provide a supplementary diagnostic criteria. This research paper was completed within the field of clinical psychology as it conducts research on individuals who suffer from mental disorders. The main question that is being answered is “what are the typical features of abnormal bodily experiences in people affected by acute first-episode schizophrenia?” By ‘typical’ they mean “a recurrent form of (anomalous) experience that, by means of phenomenological analysis, may help grasp the core feature of this class of phenomena (validity), that feature that may help distinguish this class from similar phenomena, namely those phenomena which occur in a different psychopathological condition (specificity).” These researchers hypothesized that ABEs are a significant psychopathological factor in the course of schizophrenia. Information that could be helpful in better understanding the research conducted, and its findings includes knowing many definitions and abbreviations. Abnormal bodily experiences are referred to as ABEs, and are defined as “subjective, experimental anomalies in one’s feelings, sensations, and perceptions arising in the domain of one’s lived body.” Early schizophrenia can be understood as the experience of feeling symptoms of schizophrenia before fully developing it.
Sleep terrors are commonly known by a few terms, including sleep terrors, night terrors, sleep terror disorder, and pavor nocturnus. The person having a sleep terror will awaken from a dream crying or screaming, which may last for minutes. The person is difficult to awaken and confused. There is no recollection of the
Willis described neurological disorders, revealing the clinical methodology becoming the basis of modern medicine. He studied seizures (partial seizures, epilepsy, and movement disorders) asserting they are a consequence of activity in the brain. Willis also classified hysteria as a brain disorder. He penned descriptions of headache, apoplexy, neurosyphilis, narcolepsy, paracusis, mental retardation, and other psychiatric disorders.
In the 1980s, as a professor of visual psychology at the University of California at San Diego, he came upon a phenomenon that appealed to his interest in anomalies in the deepest way—the so-called phantom limb syndrome. In this case, people who have had a limb amputated continue to experience sensation and pain where the limb used to be. In his research as a visual psychologist, Ramachandran had specialized in optical illusions—instances in which the brain would incorrectly fill in information from what the eyes had processed. Phantom limbs represented an