Susannah Cahalan suffered from a rare brain disease that included delusions and hallucinations; she wrote about the experience in her book Brain on Fire. Cahalan's disease was called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. The disease begins with symptoms similar to the flu and then progresses into delusions and hallucination episodes. These are followed by an unresponsive period, during which the patient starts to have seizures and has difficulty breathing.
One of the hallucinations that Cahalan has in Brain on Fire involves a moment where she is watching a newswoman talk about her on the television. During this time, Cahalan calls for a nurse to come to her room, but she hears one of her roommates in the hospital laughing. The woman speaks in Spanish, but Cahalan believes she can understand what the woman is saying, and she believes the woman is going to record her talking. Then she is going to send the recording into the Post. The roommate tells Cahalan that the nurses can't be trusted and Cahalan becomes frightened. She runs outside of her room after pulling out the EEG electrodes connected to her body. Two nurses have to pull her down and contain her until help comes. This episode is entirely a hallucination that Cahalan has while in the hospital.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
What is an example of a delusion in the book Brain on Fire?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment