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A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)
11–20 of 79 posts
Re: A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)
#12This reminds me of a quote from Mark Cuban: “Unless you have a reliable, duplicatable, scalable and consistent way to bring potential customers in, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby!”
I think it’s very similar in science. It’s difficult to argue that this is science because it seems impossible to design a repeatable experiment which yields the same outcome every time.
Re: A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)
#13Simplest explanation is usually the correct one(Occam’s razor). In this case i would agree with the second or third explanations. She probably made it up. Similar thing is going on with resignation syndrome in Sweden, where refugee children are pretending to be be in coma/sleeping because this prevents Sweden to send them out of the country. In this case the woman wanted to get free treatment from NHS. Or maybe this whole story is made up.
Re: A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)
#14I simply don't believe this. The implication is that some external knowledgable entity communicated with the patient. There's no way to prove what really happened, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the easiest explanations are that the entire anecdote is fabricated; that someone was communicating with the patient through normal means and due to illness she interpreted it as a hallucinatory voice; or…
That's not the easiest explanation, it's just more convenient for you. Burde of proof is on the accuser, you can't prove they fabricated or hallucinated and no one can prove their experience to you. If they learned new information with no prior visits to any one capable of diagnosing them then the easiest explanation is their experience was real, especially give that this phenomena has been observed in other historic…
This is the exact opposite of how burden of proof works. An extraordinary claim is being made. The burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claim. The claim is not only extraordinary, but the anecdote does not include any information indicating research into the origin of the "voices". I don't have to prove anything. I'm saying I don't believe it. The full article contains zero citations, zero clinical records, zero anything. It's a story. Maybe it's entertaining, but again, it's not science or medicine.
Re: A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)
#15I simply don't believe this. The implication is that some external knowledgable entity communicated with the patient. There's no way to prove what really happened, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the easiest explanations are that the entire anecdote is fabricated; that someone was communicating with the patient through normal means and due to illness she interpreted it as a hallucinatory voice; or…
That's not the easiest explanation, it's just more convenient for you. Burde of proof is on the accuser, you can't prove they fabricated or hallucinated and no one can prove their experience to you. If they learned new information with no prior visits to any one capable of diagnosing them then the easiest explanation is their experience was real, especially give that this phenomena has been observed in other historic…
> Burde of proof is on the accuser, you can't prove they fabricated or hallucinated and no one can prove their experience to you.
No, burden of proof is on the person making the interesting claim. If I claim that I went to Mars, and you claim I'm lying, the burden is on me to prove I went to Mars, because humans lying is boring, and humans going to Mars is interesting.
This is what people are trying to get at with the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" copypasta: It's so easy for humans to make shit up that the evidence is on the person who told the story, especially if it's an interesting story you want to believe.
> Fear of the unknown is also a bias we should be aware of.
Bulverism is saying "Of course you believe/don't believe that because of some trait you have!" It's irrelevant, in that it doesn't disprove the belief. It doesn't matter if they believe something because it's blue on Tuesday and today is Odin's favorite month. If it's true, it's true, and if it's false, you only find out if it's false by examining the belief and its logical consequences, not the traits of the person who proposed it, positive or negative.
Re: A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)
#16I simply don't believe this. The implication is that some external knowledgable entity communicated with the patient. There's no way to prove what really happened, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the easiest explanations are that the entire anecdote is fabricated; that someone was communicating with the patient through normal means and due to illness she interpreted it as a hallucinatory voice; or…
> or that the patient had acquired information about the hospital facilities through normal means and due to illness the memories manifested as hallucinatory voices
A variant of this appears in the abstract: that some speculated she was somehow unconsciously aware of the tumor or "not feeling right" and that perhaps she had internalized more knowledge of the locations of hospitals than she was aware, so this surfaced as the hallucinations telling her to go to the place she knew (without knowing) could fix it.
Re: A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)
#17As I was reading this I immediately went for the third explanation given, or a similar variant. One possible take on it is that the tumour made her plural/multiple. Then her new members wondered where they came from and came up with the tumour explanation, researched treatment, and communicated it back to her main self. Read this if you haven't heard about plurality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicity_(psyc…
This isn't science. "Multiplicity" isn't real. The Wikipedia article on disassociative identity disorder ("multiple personality disorder") is much more extensive, and while some psychiatrists consider that to be clinically real, the majority don't. There's no evidence of any of it being anything more than an act. It's all crackpot nonsense.
"It's all crackpot nonsense" isn't a very good argument when it comes to the human brain, now is it? That sounds like the same class of garbage argument that transphobes use to claim trans people aren't real.
You can call it whatever you want, but DID is indeed recognized in the DSM-5 and fits the OP story, and the disorder vs neurodiversity argument is largely tangential to the question of whether the condition exists at all, which it clearly does.
"Science" in general has a terrible track record when it comes to the human brain, because we still have no idea how most of it works and you can't exactly attach a JTAG debugger to someone's head. So saying psychological conditions "aren't science" is unscientific, because a proper scientist in the field would accept the limitations of the field, and be open to consistent phenomena (which telepathy isn't with the hard sciences, but multiplicity is).
Re: A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)
#18I simply don't believe this. The implication is that some external knowledgable entity communicated with the patient. There's no way to prove what really happened, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the easiest explanations are that the entire anecdote is fabricated; that someone was communicating with the patient through normal means and due to illness she interpreted it as a hallucinatory voice; or…
You have obviously not actually read the article and are railing against a strawman.
The third of your ‘easiest explanations’ is pretty much the third explanation offered in the article. The article is an object level description of what happened, with little to no speculation, apart from three tentative explanations, and does not endorse any remarkable claims about how the world operates.
You have invented that ‘implication’; nothing in the article even hints at that being the obvious implication and it’s entirely unclear what you “don’t believe” to people that have actually read the full article.
Re: A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)
#19As I was reading this I immediately went for the third explanation given, or a similar variant. One possible take on it is that the tumour made her plural/multiple. Then her new members wondered where they came from and came up with the tumour explanation, researched treatment, and communicated it back to her main self. Read this if you haven't heard about plurality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicity_(psyc…
This isn't science. "Multiplicity" isn't real. The Wikipedia article on disassociative identity disorder ("multiple personality disorder") is much more extensive, and while some psychiatrists consider that to be clinically real, the majority don't. There's no evidence of any of it being anything more than an act. It's all crackpot nonsense.
I don't know too much about it. But I knew somebody who said they had it and it turned out to be a more ordinary psychosis that they eventually had treatment for. Seems to me that if you are correct that it doesn't exist, that there can still be people who genuinely believe they have it and may have another illness. Those people deserve better than to be dismissed as crackpots. Like maybe to approach it as one would schizophrenia may help.
From there I may say that a more accepted diagnosis like "schizophrenia" still has imprecision and wiggle room, owing in part to the fact that we don't fully understand mental illness.
Re: A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)
#20This reminded me of the guy who thought a third party was interfering with his life, and then realized he had CO poisoning thanks to a good person on the internet. And the third party in question was his past self. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34m92h/update_... So I wonder...is it possible that this person's memory (of e.g. personal health research) or consciousness was affected by the malady to the…
I Suffered CO2 poisoning for months. This explanation is believable.
My sense of time was screwed up.
It got to the point I would often joke about being casualty challenged. (When more lucid)
Hallucinations started up from this. A constant sense of doom became the norm.
So yea, confused timeline, hallucinations and, and a sense of going to die can make some interesting and unpleasant mental games.