You can be an expert on brains and spend 30 years studying mental disorders, and it still will not prepare you for your own madness. Expertise won’t explain why you no longer recognize your house or car, or why you’ve gone for a morning jog with a plastic bag full of purple henna on your head and have no idea where you are, even though this is your own neighborhood, your own streets, and these are the trees and flowers you pass every day. If anyone should have been able to recognize the changes in her own behavior and connect them to transformations in her brain, it was Barbara Lipska. As a neuroscientist and director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Lipska has poked, prodded, examined, sliced, diced, and analyzed countless brains, trying to find the distinctions between sickness and health. Yet when she lost her own mind in 2015, Lipska didn’t know that things were going awry. Neither did her family of doctors. “We were completely oblivious to it,” she says. Now, Lipska has to check sometimes to make sure she’s thinking clearly. “I’m terrified. I won’t see it when it happens. I watch myself. I ask questions of my family,” she says. “Am I sane? Am I logical? Am I making sense? How would I know? It’s a terrifying experience.”
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https://qz.com/1423416/a-neuroscientist-who-lost-her-mind-explains-the-brain/
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This is a fascinating article which shows the delicate line of sanity we all walk every day.
Interestingly she mentioned that her frontal cortex was implicated when she was diagnosed with brain cancer, and this reminded me of Phineas Gage whose frontal cortex was damaged as the result of a railroad spike. The dramatic personality changes can be extreme as this article demonstrates.
Alos interesting was that the myths people sometimes hold onto about mental illness, for instance that personality is stable or that only specific types of people can become mentally ill. Misconceptions such as these only serve to isolate the individual suffering.
Great article and a great insight into the difference between understanding a mental disorder intellectually and the knowledge that comes from experincing it directly.