Read Online Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Oliver Sacks
Ads: Link
generate any sound, image, or smell in its repertoire, sometimes in complex and “impossible” combinations.
1 . Molly Birnbaum, an aspiring chef who became anosmic after being struck by a car, has described the anosmic’s predicament eloquently in her memoir
Season to Taste
.
2 . Among these other conditions is infection with the herpes simplex virus, which can attack nerves (including sometimes the olfactory nerves), both impairing and stimulating them. The virus can remain dormant for long periods, sequestered in nerve ganglia, and suddenly reemerge at intervals of months or years. One man, a microbiologist, wrote to me: “In the summer of 2006, I began to ‘smell things,’ a faint pervasive odor that I could not identify (my best guess was … wet cardboard).” Prior to this, he said, “I had a highly sensitive nose, and was able to identify my laboratory cultures by smell alone, or subtle differences in organic solvents, or faint perfumes.”
He soon developed a constant hallucination of the smell of rotting fish, which faded only after a year had passed, along with most of his “olfactory acuity and the subtlety of most foods.” He wrote:
Certain odors are completely gone—feces(!), baking bread, or cookies, roasting turkey, garbage, roses, the fresh soil smell of
Streptomyces
… all gone. I miss the smells of Thanksgiving, but not the smell of public toilets.
The dysosmia and phantosmia were due to a reemergence of the herpes simplex 2 which he had contracted many years before, and he is intrigued that these are always preceded by hallucinatory smells. He writes, “I smell the onset of herpes reactivation. A day or two prior to the onset of a neuritis episode, I again have olfactory hallucinations of the last strong smell I noticed. [This smell] persists during the neuritis and fades as the neuritis fades.… The strength of the hallucinations is correlated with the severity of the generalized neuritis.”
4
Hearing Things
I n 1973 the journal
Science
published an article that caused an immediate furor. It was entitled “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” and it described how, as an experiment, eight “pseudopatients” with no history of mental illness presented themselves at a variety of hospitals across the United States. Their single complaint was that they “heard voices.” They told hospital staff that they could not really make out what the voices said but that they heard the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” Apart from this fabrication, they behaved normally and recounted their own (normal) past experiences and medical histories. Nonetheless, all of them were diagnosed as schizophrenic (except one, who was diagnosed with “manic-depressive psychosis”), hospitalized for up to two months, and prescribed antipsychotic medications (which they did not swallow). Once admitted to the mental wards, they continued to speak and behave normally; they reported to the medical staff that their hallucinated voices had disappearedand that they felt fine. They even kept notes on their experiment, quite openly (this was registered in the nursing notes for one pseudopatient as “writing behavior”), but none of the pseudopatients were identified as such by the staff. 1 This experiment, designed by David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist (and himself a pseudopatient), emphasized, among other things, that the single symptom of “hearing voices” could suffice for an immediate, categorical diagnosis of schizophrenia even in the absence of any other symptoms or abnormalities of behavior. Psychiatry, and society in general, had been subverted by the almost axiomatic belief that “hearing voices” spelled madness and never occurred except in the context of severe mental disturbance.
This belief is a fairly recent one, as the careful and humane reservations of early researchers on schizophrenia made clear. But by the 1970s, antipsychotic drugs and tranquilizers had begun to replace
1 . Molly Birnbaum, an aspiring chef who became anosmic after being struck by a car, has described the anosmic’s predicament eloquently in her memoir
Season to Taste
.
2 . Among these other conditions is infection with the herpes simplex virus, which can attack nerves (including sometimes the olfactory nerves), both impairing and stimulating them. The virus can remain dormant for long periods, sequestered in nerve ganglia, and suddenly reemerge at intervals of months or years. One man, a microbiologist, wrote to me: “In the summer of 2006, I began to ‘smell things,’ a faint pervasive odor that I could not identify (my best guess was … wet cardboard).” Prior to this, he said, “I had a highly sensitive nose, and was able to identify my laboratory cultures by smell alone, or subtle differences in organic solvents, or faint perfumes.”
He soon developed a constant hallucination of the smell of rotting fish, which faded only after a year had passed, along with most of his “olfactory acuity and the subtlety of most foods.” He wrote:
Certain odors are completely gone—feces(!), baking bread, or cookies, roasting turkey, garbage, roses, the fresh soil smell of
Streptomyces
… all gone. I miss the smells of Thanksgiving, but not the smell of public toilets.
The dysosmia and phantosmia were due to a reemergence of the herpes simplex 2 which he had contracted many years before, and he is intrigued that these are always preceded by hallucinatory smells. He writes, “I smell the onset of herpes reactivation. A day or two prior to the onset of a neuritis episode, I again have olfactory hallucinations of the last strong smell I noticed. [This smell] persists during the neuritis and fades as the neuritis fades.… The strength of the hallucinations is correlated with the severity of the generalized neuritis.”
4
Hearing Things
I n 1973 the journal
Science
published an article that caused an immediate furor. It was entitled “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” and it described how, as an experiment, eight “pseudopatients” with no history of mental illness presented themselves at a variety of hospitals across the United States. Their single complaint was that they “heard voices.” They told hospital staff that they could not really make out what the voices said but that they heard the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” Apart from this fabrication, they behaved normally and recounted their own (normal) past experiences and medical histories. Nonetheless, all of them were diagnosed as schizophrenic (except one, who was diagnosed with “manic-depressive psychosis”), hospitalized for up to two months, and prescribed antipsychotic medications (which they did not swallow). Once admitted to the mental wards, they continued to speak and behave normally; they reported to the medical staff that their hallucinated voices had disappearedand that they felt fine. They even kept notes on their experiment, quite openly (this was registered in the nursing notes for one pseudopatient as “writing behavior”), but none of the pseudopatients were identified as such by the staff. 1 This experiment, designed by David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist (and himself a pseudopatient), emphasized, among other things, that the single symptom of “hearing voices” could suffice for an immediate, categorical diagnosis of schizophrenia even in the absence of any other symptoms or abnormalities of behavior. Psychiatry, and society in general, had been subverted by the almost axiomatic belief that “hearing voices” spelled madness and never occurred except in the context of severe mental disturbance.
This belief is a fairly recent one, as the careful and humane reservations of early researchers on schizophrenia made clear. But by the 1970s, antipsychotic drugs and tranquilizers had begun to replace
Similar Books
