Posted by bill marin on October 21, 2000, at 9:07:32
In reply to What are hallucinations?, posted by GLYN on October 18, 2000, at 19:09:20
To me, your visual distortions sound more physiological than purely psychological. IMO, changes in blood pressure, body chemistry, etc, can probably explain the sorts of visual effects you're describing.
Otherwise, the thought-process displayed by your post reminds me of my own when I'm having a panic attack. I've heard that panic attacks usually reflect anxiety about physical phenomenon such as fainting, heart attacks, seizures -- but mine have always been extremely existential, and the personal always bleeds over into the social/universal . . . what they have in common with the more typical attacks (as I understand them) is that they center around a fear of losing a "grip" on something that "grounds" me existentially (and this can take the form of: what I believe I have a grip on is really fluid or doesn't exist at all, hence my grip is illusory). Reality is a good example. Here's an abbreviate way of the way it works for me sometimes: if reality is ultimately subjective, then I really, ultimately, have nothing significant in common with anyone else . . . if I have nothing significant in common with anyone else and yet I live in the world with others, then who I am on a day-to-day basis must be an illusion . . . and since the very ways in which I understand what it means to be a human being, a person, have been inhereted from the culture around me, I must not understand or know myself at all. So who am I? Suddenly my very sense of identity and its existence in any world at all seems to have had the rug pulled out from underneath -- and with a few more applications of such logic, I'm in a full-blown panic attack, convinced that "who I am" no longer exists and that I must be going crazy. In fact, just typing out those words raised my blood pressure significantly . . .
As for the *academic* side of your question, you raise the age-old philosophical question of solopsism and the problem of others (I could dreaming all of this, so how do I know that other people are not just figments of my imagination?). In the 20th Century, the very grounds of this dilemma were throughly debunked, refuted, and demonstrated to be the effects of utterly nonsensical (but extraordinarily subtle) confusions (Wittgenstein, IMO, did the best job of this). Again, I'm just speaking academically (if anyone out there *really* believes reality is ultimately subjective, no academic argument is going to stand in the way, just as no academic argument is capable of making an athiest out of a believer). Personally speaking, though, it comforts me to remind myself of the conclusions of those academic demonstrations. :)
Best of wishes,
Bill> Since I have been suffering from anxiety and taking citalopram I have occasionaly had blurring of vision and objects do sometimes appear a little hazy or seem to even vibrate ever so slightly. Its happens when I am in a panic usually. IS this an hallucination and does it indictae something more than anxiety or is this an affect of the medication or even just adrenelin. Do psychotics actualy see whole things as real as life when they dont exist in such as a way as they would swaer they really are there or is it similar to my experiences?
>
> Also, I sometimes get terrified I'm going crazy or even worry about silly things to an amazing extent - is this a dellusion? OR is a dellusion a complete and total conviction of something unreasonable by contemptorary standars and to what extent are cultural beleifs taken into account by the medical profession? I once knew a Christina who was convinced that demons were everywhere - this is normal for some types of CHristians and is what is taught in some churches so is this a dellusion or is it just a sub-cultural belief that is "normal" for those within that environment?
>
> What I really mean by the last point is what is realty anyway? How can we say that we have lost touch with realty when realty is experienced so differently by different groups of people. If a person beleives something or sees a thing which others do not is this just a mark of their individuality and their own subjective perceptions of a world in which few of us agree on much.
>
> I have both a personal and academic interest in this.
poster:bill marin
thread:46711
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20001012/msgs/46956.html