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The terrorist inside my husband's brain

m.neurology.org

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Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#141

Post by oldmanjay »

HSO wrote: post #33

This is obviously painful for the family and the fans, and I hope my words are not taken in the wrong way. But I really wish Americans (and yes, I think it's mostly Americans who have this tendency) would choose their words more carefully. If I am not mistaken, we are talking about a disease . What makes the analogy to "terrorism" apt here? For a while, everything seemed to be a "war" ("war on drugs", "war on crime",…

Do you truly feel like Americans moreso than any other nationality choose words poorly, in your estimation? That seems like a fairly unsupportable hypothesis. One might say it's a poorly chosen place to point the finger.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#142

Post by smallnamespace »

dredmorbius wrote: post #132
rtpg wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small group can splinter off and survive. My arm cannot survive on its own

A small group of people is not going to survive at a modern, first-world, technological level of civilisation, providing itself with oil, coal, electricity, silicon chips, cotton, synthetics, pharmaceuticals, food, lumber, iron, steel, aluminium, glass, etc., etc. It might manage to provide for itself at a ~1650 level of subsistence, in a favourable climate. Modern civilisation is a team sport.

The point still stands -- your arm is not going to survive in any way shape or form, while small groups of people can and will, despite difficulties.

Humans have survived the collapse of their own societies before, but no cells survive the death of a body (HeLa cell line notwithstanding).

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#143

Post by cloudjacker »

davidhariri wrote: post #17

When I heard Robin had passed I had assumed it was from depression, but what does that even mean? This essay has really challenged me to go deeper on what mental illness is- a disease just like cancer that has causes which can be mechanical. It's heart-breaking to think of a person with no way out of rapid decline other than to check out early.

It was widely reported that the "comedian" was "suffering from depression"

It fed into an existing trope and nobody was willing to have the conversation that would challenge that, or if they did it was viewed as insensitive and downvoted to the point of censorship

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#144

Post by eternalban »

refulgentis wrote: post #136
eternalban wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> impose high economic costs The West rolled back on Habeas Corpus and here we have you lamenting over economic costs. So, who "won" again?

I was nervous writing that post, imagining someone would think of even more severe things we lost, that I surely couldn't remember everything while furiously tapping out a post, and they'd glibly refer to it as if I had forgotten the fall of Western civilization had occurred, while I only cared about money ! I told myself this was being far too fearful. Surely those reading would recognize that the absence of every o…

> I was nervous writing that post

We're just exchanging ideas and viewpoints here. Nothing to be nervous about, specially since we're both posting with opaque handles.

> I couldn't enumerate everything in a post that was already too long.

Right. It's just a matter of priorities for a short short list.

> narcissistic performance art, someone hopping in, vastly exaggerating with statements like habeas corpus was rolled back!

I would have welcomed a reasoned response that did not consist in toto of imaginal matters and an apparent personal attack.

Here is another piece of "narcissistic performance art" for you: http://www.nyupress.org/webchapters/hafetz_911_toc.pdf

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#145

Post by refulgentis »

eternalban wrote: post #144
refulgentis wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was nervous writing that post, imagining someone would think of even more severe things we lost, that I surely couldn't remember everything while furiously tapping out a post, and they'd glibly refer to it as if I had forgotten the fall of Western civilization had occurred, while I only cared about money ! I told myself this was being far too fearful. Surely those reading would recognize that the absence of every o…

> I was nervous writing that post We're just exchanging ideas and viewpoints here. Nothing to be nervous about, specially since we're both posting with opaque handles. > I couldn't enumerate everything in a post that was already too long. Right. It's just a matter of priorities for a short short list. > narcissistic performance art, someone hopping in, vastly exaggerating with statements like habeas corpus was rolled…

It's impossible to respond to your post with a response involving reason, you're not appealing to reason.

You made an unfounded assertion, with a scolding for not enumerating your unfounded assertion in my list of consequences of 9/11. This list is no list – it's literally two items that I had chosen specifically for that paragraph because A) they were important to my reasoning B) they were the two explicit goals of al Qaeda operations, decided upon as the best strategy after increasing scare resources limited potential scope of operations, and lack of appetite to become a religious nation-state.

When called on your unfounded assertion and scolding, you attempted to take a step back. You sarcastically mocked my defense, by conflating the time I took to write a long post, with me taking time to write a long list of absolutely every cost to humanity after 9/11. You claimed my response was really just imaginary concerns and a personal attack, complained I didn't engage your unfounded assertion, and posted two pages of the table of contents of an unidentified book.

I spent ~10 minutes trying to learn more about the author and his assertions, and couldn't find any information on Google that would remotely shed light on your unfounded assertion.

Even if I had, it doesn't change anything. The most charitable version of the only argument you've offered is I'm callous to care more about trillion of dollars in economics consequences that our fundamental rights as a society. That's not what happened. All that happened is I built the paragraph around mentioning al Qaeda's only two explicitly goals, and that they had accomplished them at level beyond their wildest imagination.

At the end, I'm thinking, this was utterly a waste of time for the both of us, except you've gotten to engage me two posts in a row now. That's usually the mark of a troll.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#146

Post by eternalban »

refulgentis wrote: post #145
eternalban wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was nervous writing that post We're just exchanging ideas and viewpoints here. Nothing to be nervous about, specially since we're both posting with opaque handles. > I couldn't enumerate everything in a post that was already too long. Right. It's just a matter of priorities for a short short list. > narcissistic performance art, someone hopping in, vastly exaggerating with statements like habeas corpus was rolled…

It's impossible to respond to your post with a response involving reason, you're not appealing to reason. You made an unfounded assertion, with a scolding for not enumerating your unfounded assertion in my list of consequences of 9/11. This list is no list – it's literally two items that I had chosen specifically for that paragraph because A) they were important to my reasoning B) they were the two explicit goals of…

I'm OK with letting my responses to stand as they are with a note of objection to your extreme mischaracterization of content and your claims of knowing my 'intent'.

As a helpful final note, here is the NYU Press page with reviews of the cited book: http://nyupress.org/books/9780814737033/

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#147

Post by Pokepokalypse »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #13

> 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.

My mother has LBD (as near as the doctors can tell, because it can't be diagnosed while the patient is alive) - and we're pretty sure she hallucinates, but she doesn't share that with us. She used to tell us about seeing some random animals running through the yard - some fairly unbelievable, but plausible things.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#148

Post by Pokepokalypse »

gilaniali wrote: post #34

It is astounding that someone with the resources to pay for the best medical care was unable to arrive at the correct diagnosis. As we move towards AI assisted diagnoses, hopefully such suffering can be mitigated. Do neurologists follow checklists when diagnosing symptoms? Will this case change their procedures going forward?

LBD can only be diagnosed through microscopic analysis of brain tissue. Though symptom-checklists work, LBD patients are frequently misdiagnosed as PD or Alzheimer's. Some of the meds for those diseases make LBD symptoms much worse, so that is another way LBD can be identified. Happened with my mom.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#149

Post by dredmorbius »

smallnamespace wrote: post #142
dredmorbius wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small group of people is not going to survive at a modern, first-world, technological level of civilisation, providing itself with oil, coal, electricity, silicon chips, cotton, synthetics, pharmaceuticals, food, lumber, iron, steel, aluminium, glass, etc., etc. It might manage to provide for itself at a ~1650 level of subsistence, in a favourable climate. Modern civilisation is a team sport.

The point still stands -- your arm is not going to survive in any way shape or form, while small groups of people can and will, despite difficulties. Humans have survived the collapse of their own societies before, but no cells survive the death of a body (HeLa cell line notwithstanding).

What group is it you're hiving off from society exactly?

Because in the same way that your arm is an integral subunit of a whole which makes no sense without that contextualising state, any organised subunit of modern society will stop functioning in its subunit sense.

An isolated business, or factory, or town, or neighbourhood, or even family, will no longer have its prior context.

You'll all but certainly see a massive amount of mortality.

Some very small sets of individuals might survive, but, again, within an entirely different context. And only in the right nourishing environment.

Much as a few select cells from an arm might, if sufficiently general, continue to exist if put in an appropriate nutrient solution, protected from bacteria or other disease, and generally cared for.

I don't think you're conning on to the systems view of this concept, and the distinction between individual and society, or cell and organism.

Re: The terrorist inside my husband's brain

#150

Post by Confusion »

ubernostrum wrote: post #135
Confusion wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Describing the behavior of immune cells as categorizing cells in 'self' and 'non-self' is itself an example of engaging in metaphor. It's an example of anthropomorphising the behavior of cells. You can just as easily describe the behavior of immune cells as categorizing cells into 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' and killing the 'unhealthy' cells. Suddenly the disease is not about internal conflict, but about internal hygie…

Except that the immune system's idea of what set of molecules to accept and what set to kill is not based on a generalized idea of what a "healthy cell" looks like -- otherwise we wouldn't have such trouble matching people for organ transplants, since our immune systems would just accept any generically healthy organ. Instead it's dependent on the (specific to the individual) set of genes controlling the major histoc…

Yes, what is 'healthy' looks different for each individual. That doesn't mean that something is found to be 'healthy' because it is 'self'.

The immune systems primary function is housekeeping: killing cells that are still completely 'self', but are old, worn down or dysfunctional in some other way. Killing 'invaders' and cancers is minor in terms of the numbers of cells destroyed.

As your transplant example shows: something foreign can be found to be entirely 'healthy' by your immune system. So self vs. foreign is too narrow.

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