My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was • Hacker News Board

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#131

Post by mst » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 2:53 AM UTC

api wrote: post #101

csense wrote: post #46

Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture? Maybe memories are stored in some partitioned database, and one of the partitions is always stuff relating to "my identity", and somehow this partition can get unlinked and temporarily re-linked to a blank one, which is discarded after a few hours. Hmm, maybe this…

Hacker News: where a very human story of empathy and healing immediately turns into a discussion of what this can tell us about the brain's computational architecture.

Let's do both. My dissociative loves would all consider it a win.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#132

Post by m_mueller » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:00 AM UTC

mst wrote: post #127

m_mueller wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't something like polaroids be a good strategy, you know, like in Memento? When she forgets everything, have her grab photos from her bag, one together with every person she trusts, one of her in front of her building, one of her in front of a street sign for her neighbourhood. Also, a pocket mirror if she really forgets who or even what she is.

Interesting thought, but the loss is of context not moments, so it turns out to be a terrible strategy even though your idea is great.

Maybe it wouldn't help so much to get the person back into the 'normal' state. But if I read the article correctly, part of the problem is also that she gets scared and she needs some reassurance that she can trust someone - otherwise both her and her SO could get into significant danger. That's what I mean with the polaroid strategy - at least it should help her to reestablish some trust, so they can get into a more relaxed situation where it's possible to heal? In the article he actually also used the photos hanged up in the apartment to start bringing her back a bit, so at least in their case I think it might help a bit.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#133

Post by mapt » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:17 AM UTC

Klinky wrote: post #106

mapt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is a self-aware, behavioral component to not just dissociative events, but to most maladaptive psychiatric disorders. This component may be small or large - the fact that we've medicalized the disorder simply says that the overall pattern of behavior is causing severe problems, nothing about cause or self-awareness. The people afflicted with them are not simply normal people who are possessed by a rando…

Such rose-colored glasses of the past you have. The handling of the mentally ill in the past was atrocious. Hiding mental illness away is very convenient for society, but it doesn't fix the actual problem. People who suffer brain trauma often end up with it affecting their personality. It is quite possible that many personality disorders have a physiological basis, one that is not as simple as someone "just stopping…

Yes, we hid them away, we ostracized them, we caged them, we lobotomized them, we murdered them. I'm not downplaying that by any means.

The physiological and the psychological and the sociological interact to produce psychiatric problems in the forms and rates we see. The fact that we've diagnosed a person with a disorder means that the person is failing to control their condition as well as we desire; It's wishful just-world thinking to believe they have no control whatsoever on the one hand, but on the other hand condemning them for failing to control their condition is needlessly cruel. Some of it is in our head, because the place we exist is in our head. There is still a person living in that head, and they deserve our empathy regardless of why they're behaving the way they're behaving... no matter how much our normal interpersonal script demands culpability of them at times.

We suspend culpability not because "It's the disease doing it, not the person" - the two are not easily separable - but only because culpability has proven not to be effective at enhancing control in the past with this person.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#134

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:18 AM UTC

jonalmeida wrote: post #116

Dylan16807 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvoting doesn't always mean you did anything wrong, it can mean you have incorrect information and the comment being gray is there to warn people.

A comment should suffice in that case, shouldn't it?

Comments are fine but take much longer.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#135

Post by DigitalSea » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:21 AM UTC

I think it takes a strong person to be able to handle a situation like this. I would like to think I could be this strong if my fiancee suffered from the same condition, but I think I would find it too heartbreaking to be temporarily forgotten like this.

The part about his girlfriend calling her ex at his requst was a courageous act from her current boyfriend. It must be hard knowing that your girlfriend in her dissoaciate state can forget you, but remember her ex boyfriend enough to trust him. That would be so hard for many people to handle.

A really great story. It is great to see a story hit the front-page that isn't neccesarily about programming (not in the software sense).

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#136

Post by m_mueller » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:22 AM UTC

pbz wrote: post #128

m_mueller wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating, thanks for your reply. I can imagine photos to not be enough. For me the association is strongest with scents and noises/music - this gets me back to a memory the fastest. I guess this is similar with this disorder? What's hard for me to imagine is how this disorder works physically, at least with the primitive model I have on how the brain works. The synaptical connection are still there, otherwise the…

Everyone is different; scents, music, words, touch, observing the surroundings, listing the colors they see, focusing on breathing, holding a familiar object (like a rock), etc. can all be used -- whatever works. You can use drugs to help with the symptoms, but you can't "fix" it with drugs. There's nothing physically wrong with a DID patient (although they do tend to suffer from various "side effects" that are linke…

Because I'm a computer engineer I naturally tend to look at the brain in terms of how computers work. I hope I'm not being disrespectful, but this thing sounds eerily like memory corruption. I mean like corrupted pointers that lead to a garbage addresses. If it's something like that I can well imagine why it's so difficult to deal with - after all you can't 'reinstall' a person's mind. Maybe in the future, if/when we get more precise model's of someone's thoughts, patients could be trained to not go to these corrupted places in their minds? Say, with some sort of neurological videogame that reassociates the paths towards these memories with something bad, and paths that branch off and don't lead to a corruption with something good? I'm most certainly a fish out of the water here, but I like to throw ideas around and keep sort of a childlike naivety about it, if you don't mind.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#137

Post by aaronem » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:55 AM UTC

api wrote: post #101

csense wrote: post #46

Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture? Maybe memories are stored in some partitioned database, and one of the partitions is always stuff relating to "my identity", and somehow this partition can get unlinked and temporarily re-linked to a blank one, which is discarded after a few hours. Hmm, maybe this…

Hacker News: where a very human story of empathy and healing immediately turns into a discussion of what this can tell us about the brain's computational architecture.

Eh. I mean, I see what you're saying, but it is an interesting line of inquiry, and right up HN's alley.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#138

Post by 001sky » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 3:55 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #125

001sky wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is too strong a response. You and nobody else has a 1:1 memory map of an intense experience. It can takes weeks if not months (plural) to remember everything that happened to you in the last month. That is because basically your brain samples space time and segments in in your memory in a non-linear fashion. This is why people have flashbacks. When people recall linear events, they only recal prioritized samples…

If you don't remember events due to not paying attention (being "tuned out") that is simply not the same as not remembering who you are or who your boyfriend is. In the former case, you don't remember the events because you were neglecting to commit them to memory. In the latter case, you have the memory, but it is temporarily inaccessible --- and comes back. Memories that you did not form because you were tuned out…

There are (clinically) lots of times people don't pay attention and 'tune things out' due to hyper-viigilance.

That process leads to somewhat fractured long-term memory. Basically your brain starts to use short-term memory for something like l2 cach and starts writing stuff that would have gone first into short-term memory and then archived elswhere with a "bibliography" note, directly into deep memory at 1:1 without any simple summary of the memory.

This is how you get people with intensely detailed memory "stacks" without a fully operational "card-catalog" of what is actually in the libary.

The key point is these steps are somewhat plastic.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#139

Post by pbz » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 4:00 AM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #136

pbz wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is different; scents, music, words, touch, observing the surroundings, listing the colors they see, focusing on breathing, holding a familiar object (like a rock), etc. can all be used -- whatever works. You can use drugs to help with the symptoms, but you can't "fix" it with drugs. There's nothing physically wrong with a DID patient (although they do tend to suffer from various "side effects" that are linke…

Because I'm a computer engineer I naturally tend to look at the brain in terms of how computers work. I hope I'm not being disrespectful, but this thing sounds eerily like memory corruption. I mean like corrupted pointers that lead to a garbage addresses. If it's something like that I can well imagine why it's so difficult to deal with - after all you can't 'reinstall' a person's mind. Maybe in the future, if/when we…

Like I said in a previous post, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Think of it like a kernel driver that monitors the currently running application. If it detects that the application would overheat the CPU it swaps it out to disk and runs another one that could handle the situation better. Now, this is a very bad analogy, but at least it should give you the sense that it is a coping mechanism, not a flaw. I'd suggest to avoid comparing the brain to a computer. That analogy would hold you back more than help you.

Re: My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was

#140

Post by pcthrowaway » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 4:14 AM UTC

tbrownaw wrote: post #129

sedachv wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also schizotypal personality disorder ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disorde... ), which can look a lot like schizophrenia and can occur as a comorbidity to DID or borderline personality disorder. I had a friend who I thought was borderline, and later suspected to have DID. She sometimes said delusional things like she thought she was an alien, or that Jesus was inside her, or that sh…

like she thought she was an alien, or that Jesus was inside her, or that she was a reincarnated dolphin, etc Not sure about the aliens, but the other two are promoted by (different) major world religions.

Actually the alien one is promoted by a semi-major North American religion also.