A Disorder
What if I had a mental disorder? Reading books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat along with just seeing and hearing about different cases a little like it over my life have slowly made me wonder what it would be like to be inflicted with a disorder like that.
No matter how much I keep thinking that it would be scary, I also think that there is too good a chance that it would not be, and that is, to me, an altogether scarier proposition. It seems that most of the patients are not even aware that their mind is broken, seeing things that are not there, hearing voices that are not speaking. Now these may not seem too obvious to them, after all, it is just a voice that can be ignored or lived with (I guess). However, how can they think they have nothing wrong with them if they believe their leg is no longer theirs. See, that is one of the most interesting cases in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat to me. The Man Who Fell Out of Bed is one of the more scary disorders in the book because:
1) It never said how long this went on for.
2) It touches on this, but it never said what he thought his leg had become.
This man had looked down at his leg, had seen that it looked mangled, disgusting, inhuman, no way it could be his, let alone ANY person's legs. Immediately, the question came up: "What is he seeing?" Well, Dr. Sacks thought the same thing, and the answer reminded me of an ending of a Twilight Zone episode. All he could say that it was was... nothing. He only repeated, "I don't know..."
No matter how much I keep thinking that it would be scary, I also think that there is too good a chance that it would not be, and that is, to me, an altogether scarier proposition. It seems that most of the patients are not even aware that their mind is broken, seeing things that are not there, hearing voices that are not speaking. Now these may not seem too obvious to them, after all, it is just a voice that can be ignored or lived with (I guess). However, how can they think they have nothing wrong with them if they believe their leg is no longer theirs. See, that is one of the most interesting cases in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat to me. The Man Who Fell Out of Bed is one of the more scary disorders in the book because:
1) It never said how long this went on for.
2) It touches on this, but it never said what he thought his leg had become.
This man had looked down at his leg, had seen that it looked mangled, disgusting, inhuman, no way it could be his, let alone ANY person's legs. Immediately, the question came up: "What is he seeing?" Well, Dr. Sacks thought the same thing, and the answer reminded me of an ending of a Twilight Zone episode. All he could say that it was was... nothing. He only repeated, "I don't know..."
posted by rcw himself at
3:07 PM
1 Comments:
I agree with you that it almost seems scarier thinking that these people feel normal when they are far from normal fuction. I think that going from a normal state to a (let's just say) crazy state also influences the person's mental state. I think it would be scary to wake up and look down and feel that my leg was not my own. That situation is mind-boggling.
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