Live data from Hacker News

The terrorist inside my husband's brain

m.neurology.org

21–30 of 153 posts

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This title is more descriptive and the other, older, discussion has no comments. Merge may still be useful to remove other link.

The title here is editorialized, I'd prefer to keep her original title.

Its a little unfortunate that the bag of metaphors in popular American discourse have come to contain little beyond "war against *" and "terrorists".

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#22

> He never said he had hallucinations. [...] it became evident that most likely he did have hallucinations, but was keeping that to himself. I do not know if I would tell people about hallucinations. It is bad enough to be out of control of your function, but to have no trust in your experience is terrifying. I wouldn't be surprised if I convinced myself I didn't have them in order to feel in control.

What is the point then going to doctors searching for a reason of your problems if you don't even tell them truth about your symptoms?

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#23
post #7

This is absolutely heartbreaking. Who is cutting onions here? I think as time goes on, we will find more and more physiological sources for severe mental health problems, and that is a great step towards proper diagnosis and, hopefully, cure. Before reading this article, I thought he 'just' suffered from depression and thus a condition that cannot be diagnosed physically.

As things stand, it's unhelpful to assert that there's a purely biological cause for something like depression or schizophrenia. In fact we know that life circumstances matter in triggering these conditions, and the more honest/sensible psychiatrists use the umbrella term "biopsychosocial" which conveys the systemic and interpersonal nature of the problem.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title here is editorialized, I'd prefer to keep her original title.

Ah yes. Removing "Heartbreaking" is something I would agree with. However I would not have read an article with the other title - it makes it seem like more fluff about terrorists.

Quite so. The title changed after I'd clicked the link. Without the mention of it being a piece by Robin Williams wife I'd have skipped over assuming it another piece about radicalisation.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#25
post #22

> He never said he had hallucinations. [...] it became evident that most likely he did have hallucinations, but was keeping that to himself. I do not know if I would tell people about hallucinations. It is bad enough to be out of control of your function, but to have no trust in your experience is terrifying. I wouldn't be surprised if I convinced myself I didn't have them in order to feel in control.

What is the point then going to doctors searching for a reason of your problems if you don't even tell them truth about your symptoms?

Ironically, that point could be lost on those suffering from these sorts of symptoms - hallucinations, paranoia, etc.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#26
A common failing I've noticed in complicated multi-symptom diagnoses like this disease is that doctors tend to treat each symptom individually instead of trying to connect the dots of all the symptoms. As a programmer used to debugging complicated systems it makes no sense, my first inclination when multiple things popup at the same time is to look for the underlying root cause.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#27

> He never said he had hallucinations. [...] it became evident that most likely he did have hallucinations, but was keeping that to himself. I do not know if I would tell people about hallucinations. It is bad enough to be out of control of your function, but to have no trust in your experience is terrifying. I wouldn't be surprised if I convinced myself I didn't have them in order to feel in control.

I think many people envision hallucinations as these grand visions - like an LSD trip or something. So, when they wonder, 'am I having hallucinations?' the answer to them is clearly no.

Hallucinations can be as minor as seeing unexpected movement out of one's peripheral vision. It's can be occasionally seeing shadows that initially appear to be something else. Because those types of things seem relatively minor, people tend to disregard them. But, they can be a signal of some neurological system acting abnormally.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#28
post #27

> He never said he had hallucinations. [...] it became evident that most likely he did have hallucinations, but was keeping that to himself. I do not know if I would tell people about hallucinations. It is bad enough to be out of control of your function, but to have no trust in your experience is terrifying. I wouldn't be surprised if I convinced myself I didn't have them in order to feel in control.

I think many people envision hallucinations as these grand visions - like an LSD trip or something. So, when they wonder, 'am I having hallucinations?' the answer to them is clearly no. Hallucinations can be as minor as seeing unexpected movement out of one's peripheral vision. It's can be occasionally seeing shadows that initially appear to be something else. Because those types of things seem relatively minor, peop…

Right. My wife sometimes has auditory and occasionally the sorts of visual hallucinations you mention. I suspected it for some years but never asked her. She finally told me about it a few years ago. I've known her since the '70s.

It's not an easy thing to discuss with people. There has to be a lot of trust that, even if this person I tell thinks I'm crazy, they won't ditch me because of it.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#29
post #2

There's a second posting of this link on the second page (at the moment) that has the actual article's title - perhaps the discussion can be merged and the title normalized. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617586

We marked the other submission as a duplicate and changed the title of this one from “Heartbreaking essay by Robin Williams' wife about what happened to him”. Since the original title is neither misleading nor linkbait, the guidelines ask that we keep it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#30
post #26

A common failing I've noticed in complicated multi-symptom diagnoses like this disease is that doctors tend to treat each symptom individually instead of trying to connect the dots of all the symptoms. As a programmer used to debugging complicated systems it makes no sense, my first inclination when multiple things popup at the same time is to look for the underlying root cause.

Systems programmed by humans typically have coding standards. The human body on the other hand has been haphazardly developed over billions of years by the principle quick hack on top of quick hack on top of quick hack.

It's a complete mess of spaghetti code where anything that happens is the result of dozens of sub-systems trying to invoke or override each other.

Post reply on HN