Just Like It Feels

Posted on January 16, 2006 in Bipolar Disorder Compassion Reading

This excerpt from Susan Clancy’s Abducted: How Do People Come to Believe They Were Abducted by Aliens? provoked a thoughtful “Hmmmm”:

Today “delusions” are generally understood as patients’ best explanations for the odd sensory and perceptual experiences that are part and parcel of their disorders. According to this perspective, delusions reflect not disordered thinking, but normal thought processes that people engaged in to explain their perceived abnormal experiences (that is why they feel the way they do). Brendan Maher offered a memorable example in his “Psychology of Delusion” course at Harvard. He described the case of a woman who believed she had a hive of bees buzzing and stinging in her head; she complained about the bees for years. After she died, an autopsy revealed a brain tumor. It was the tumor which had almost certainly caused the weird sensations of buzzing and stinging that she’d felt and, quite naturally, tried to explain.

Though I was impressed with this theory of delusions — that they were people’s explanations for their anomalous experiences — one thing bothered me. Why did the explanations have to be so weird? Why did the woman in Maher’s example speak of a beehive and not “side effects from a neurological condition that is impairing my sensory and perceptual systems”? Why would someone say, “The CIA is after me,” rather than “I’m losing my hearing”? I remember Brendan Maher looking at me across the room, smiling patiently, and saying “Because that is what it felt like to them.”