{"id":678,"date":"2024-03-27T12:04:51","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T12:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/27\/its-like-staring-at-demons-meet-a-man-who-lives-with-a-disturbing-condition\/"},"modified":"2024-03-27T12:04:51","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T12:04:51","slug":"its-like-staring-at-demons-meet-a-man-who-lives-with-a-disturbing-condition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/retirednurseblog.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/27\/its-like-staring-at-demons-meet-a-man-who-lives-with-a-disturbing-condition\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s like staring at demons\u2019: Meet a man who lives with a disturbing condition"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

For 59-year-old Victor Sharrah, the terrifying symptoms began on a winter day in Nashville. <\/p>\n

Each of the once-familiar faces had a grotesque grimace, elongated eyes and deeply etched scars. When turned to the side, pointy ears suddenly appeared, he said, much like those of Spock, the Vulcan first officer on the USS Enterprise in Star Trek. <\/p>\n

\u201cI tried to explain to my roommate what I was seeing, and he thought I was nuts. Then I went outside and all of the faces of people I saw were distorted and still are,\u201d Sharrah said. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like staring at demons,\u201d he added. \u201cImagine waking up one morning and suddenly everybody in the world looks like a creature in a horror movie.\u201d <\/p>\n

Sharrah has a rare condition called prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, in which parts of the faces of other people appear distorted in shape, texture, position or color.\u00a0 Objects and other parts of a person\u2019s body, however, typically remain undisturbed. <\/p>\n

\u201cI helped create a computer-generated 2D picture of what I see in faces, but there\u2019s so much more to it,\u201d said Sharrah, speaking about research on his case that was published in the \u201cClinical Pictures\u201d section of\u00a0The Lancet\u00a0Thursday. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat people don\u2019t understand from a picture is that the distorted face is moving, contorting, talking to you, making facial gestures,\u201d he added. \u201cIt does kind of distance me from other people a bit. I try not to let it because I know what it is, it\u2019s PMO. Yet I still feel like I\u2019m not getting as close to people as I used to.\u201d <\/p>\n

All types of distortions<\/h3>\n

Prosopometamorphopsia is different from \u201cface blindness,\u201d the condition shared by actor Brad Pitt, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, renowned neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, Sweden\u2019s Crown Princess Victoria and perhaps as many as 1 in 50 people. In face blindness, faces are not distorted; instead the brain simply has trouble recognizing faces, even familiar faces \u2014 making nearly everyone a stranger. <\/p>\n

With PMO, however, a person will often have little trouble recognizing a loved one or familiar face, yet that face will be distorted, often in predictable ways. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor me the basic distortions are the same for each person, with the lines in the face, the stretching of the eyes and the mouth, and the pointy ears,\u201d Sharrah said. \u201cBut the size and shape of a person\u2019s face or head and how they move can be different and change just how distorted they might be.\u201d <\/p>\n

Some people with PMO see their own faces as distorted or even damaged. Two patients, \u201cwhile standing in front of the mirror, saw one eye popping out of its socket and slithering down the cheek,\u201d according to an April 2023 review of literature. <\/p>\n

For others with the condition, like Victor, the entire face of another person appears misshapen, much like a \u201cfunhouse mirror,\u201d according to a description in another published case study. Others see only half the face as crooked or malformed. <\/p>\n

After a tumor was removed from the left side of his brain, one patient described the right side of his doctor\u2019s face in which the \u201ceye became a ghastly staring hole, cheek bone a cavity; he had teeth on the upper lip, often had two ears.\u201d Others with PMO have eloquently described faces as \u201clike clocks in a Dal\u00ed painting\u201d or \u201ckaleidoscopically changing.\u201d <\/p>\n

Still others have seen faces morph into dragons or fish heads, or ears pop out of the top of people\u2019s heads. Some patients report seeing shortened arms attached to faces, people\u2019s eyes leaving the skull and rotating in front of it, or third eyes in the middle of people\u2019s foreheads. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe woman who saw dragons began seeing them as a child, so there are development cases of PMO in which people grow up with the condition and don\u2019t know that faces are supposed to look different,\u201d said Brad Duchaine, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. <\/p>\n

Only 81 cases of PMO exist in published literature, according to a June 2021 review, but there are likely many more people living with the condition, said Duchaine, the senior author on the Lancet case study. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe started a website so people can learn about PMO, and we\u2019ve heard from at least 80 people so far,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re finding that people from around the world are reporting the same symptoms without knowing anything about others with the condition.\u201d <\/p>\n

With so little knowledge available, many people with PMO can be diagnosed with schizophrenia or other similar hallucinatory conditions and put on anti-psychotic medications or even institutionalized, said Anto\u0302nio Vitor Reis Goncalves Mello, a doctoral student in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, who is first author on the case study. <\/p>\n

However, science now knows that people can develop PMO after a brain injury, tumor or infection, or after seizures such as in epilepsy, he said. <\/p>\n

\u201cA piece of good evidence is that in more than 50% of cases with half-face distortions, for example, the patient has a lesion to a particular part of the brain,\u201d Mello said. \u201cIn those cases we\u2019re confident they\u2019re not making it up, so when other people come along and report very similar experiences it seems unlikely that they are not being truthful.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2018Evil, twisted and demented\u2019<\/h3>\n

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teen, Sharrah struggled with mental illness that intensified into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a stint in the US Marine Corps. <\/p>\n

\u201cI was in Beirut on October 23, 1983 when they bombed our barracks. And anytime something goes wrong in my life, my biggest battle is with suicidal psychosis \u2014 it\u2019s the first place my brain turns,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n

Related article<\/span> People who attempt suicide might show signs early on. Here\u2019s what to watch for<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As part of his coping, Sharrah has been a long-time member of a Facebook suicide support group. Increasingly fearful of what was happening to him after the distortions began, he posted his symptoms online. <\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I\u2019m shutting down. Like I\u2019m dying inside. Every face I see that\u2019s not on a screen looks evil, twisted and demented. I mean literally looks like something from a John Carpenter movie,\u201d he wrote in January 2020. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m growing cold, hateful and uncaring. I don\u2019t know how to stop it. Maybe it\u2019s too late.\u201d <\/p>\n

In Casper, Wyoming, Catherine Morris was waiting for a meeting to start and just happened to check Facebook, where she was a volunteer for the same suicide support group. Having worked in schools with the visually impaired for over 30 years, she was familiar with how people sometimes saw visual distortions based on how their brains perceived different colors and intensities of light. <\/p>\n

\u201cI saw his post pop up, and I thought what do I do? I can reach out and maybe I can help him, but I don\u2019t want to give him false hope,\u201d Morris said. \u201cI told him that he had to promise me one thing \u2014 while we were working together, he couldn\u2019t hurt himself.\u201d <\/p>\n

Morris knew from her training that such distortions could be triggered by a specific area of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, which is responsible for face perception, object recognition and reading. Light distorts, so the solution, she thought, might be finding a particular color or intensity of light that might reduce his symptoms. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve bought one of the multi-colored light bulbs with an app that Catherine was able to control from Wyoming,\u201d Sharrah said. \u201cThen we got on a video call and did a whole bunch of our own tests.\u201d <\/p>\n

Afraid for his mental health, Morris had asked Sharrah for his phone number and address before the tests because if \u201che became too upset, I was calling 911.\u201d <\/p>\n

Then she had him look into a mirror while she manipulated the colors of light. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I got to the wrong color of light, the red light that intensified the distortions, I watched it happen. He started to have a full on panic attack. He withdrew from the screen and the expression on his face was quite horrified,\u201d Morris said. <\/p>\n

\u201cI told him to shut his eyes and remember that this wasn\u2019t real, his brain was tricking him,\u201d she said. \u201cThen I moved the light to green and asked him to open his eyes. He did and the distortion was gone. And he just sat there and bawled like a baby.\u201d <\/p>\n

Buoyed by their success, Morris ordered a pair of glasses tinted with the proper shade of green. Knowing that Sharrah was soon due to see his estranged daughter and meet his grandchildren for the first time, she sent them rush delivery. <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd they arrived the morning he met his granddaughters,\u201d she said. \u201cHe got to meet them for the first time, and they looked normal.\u201d <\/p>\n

Treatment and education is the goal<\/h3>\n

Today, Sharrah is working closely with Duchaine and Mello at their Dartmouth lab, helping test various interventions to ease or reverse the symptoms of PMO. <\/p>\n

The research has duplicated the benefits of green lenses in countering Sharrah\u2019s symptoms and found that manipulating colors in lenses helped others with PMO as well\u00a0\u2014 although the colors that work might differ. Another promising treatment \u2013 showing people with PMO completely symmetrical faces, which appears to reduce distortion. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf that stands up to more testing, perhaps glasses can be made to help people see faces more symmetrically,\u201d Mello said. <\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n

Related article<\/span> How red light can affect your sleep<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

But one of the biggest breakthroughs came when the team realized that Sharrah did not see distortions on 2D images. <\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the participants with PMO will see distortions to faces in real life and faces on images, which has kept us from being able to capture exactly what they see,\u201d Morro said. \u201cWith Victor, we were able to have him describe a real person\u2019s face while (also) looking at an image of them that we manipulated\u201d until it reflected the distortions he saw. <\/p>\n

The research is \u201cwonderful work,\u201d and the first time that an accurate illustration of PMO has been captured, said psychiatrist Dr. Jan Dirk Blom, who heads the Outpatient Clinic for Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes at Parnassia Psychiatric Institute in The Hague, Netherlands. <\/p>\n

For Sharrah, the research is a way that he might help save another person from being misdiagnosed by doctors unaware of the rare syndrome. <\/p>\n

\u201cI almost had myself committed to a mental hospital, and one of the people who reached out to Dartmouth was institutionalized for psychosis. How many other people are institutionalized and being put on anti-psychotics when they\u2019re not psychotic?\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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