Awful for him and his family.
I’d seek more testing with a different set of doctors- maybe at a med school? University Hospital?
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OK, so I went looking for where in Texas he was being treated (hey, I work at the Texas Med Center, he could have been next door). I can’t find a single story on the guy that names a doctor or hospital, and I can’t find any local story at all. The DailyMail claimed he’s from Granbury (just outside Dallas), but a search of Dallas area news came back empty. I can’t find anything on the guy with a source other than their social media posts.
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Weird, and slightly sus…
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My brother- and sister-in-law just moved to St. Louis. Poor bastards.
(She got a great job, though, and he’s still working his old job remotely. So not all bad.)
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Are you sure you weren’t reading about a subset of amnesia? I thought that with retrograde amnesia, that’s exactly what could happen?
I was going to post that quote too: This guy has a serious problems, but citing absolutely normal, everyday, horrific…did I mention daily?.. shock that reduces the individual to squatting in a corner, never to feel whole, alive, or balanced again is…just not enough evidence, to me, that he isn’t totally normal.
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If the world is a simulation, then someone evidently just reset to last known good.
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I’ve certainly heard of other cases of this. There was a guy a while ago that was trying to get back to an army base because he thought that he overstayed his leave, despite the fact that he’d been discharged decades ago.
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I read another article wherein he was described as earlier experiencing “stress-induced seizures” and “non-epileptic seizures,” suggesting that those events were psychogenic, e.g., not due to any underlying neurophysiologic or vascular abnormality. I’ve seen patients with similar syndromes lasting weeks, perhaps a couple months, and then gradually showing some improvement. But a year, with consistent rather than episodic manifestations? I want to know what neuroimaging and electrographic studies have shown, and what other workup has been done. Any cerebrospinal fluid abnormalities? Not enough information here.
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Seamus, although it pains us to see this, it brightens the soul to know that some humans know how to recognize the “what ever the fuck” this human dude is going through.
As always, your old cranky f’er in the high desert.
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It’s pretty much inconceivable that someone’s mind could just be rolled back 20 years like a video recording, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a patient or observer who describes it that way is lying exactly.
Any time you pull chronological narratives from your memory, you are basically reconstructing that narrative from miscellaneous associations (“I was on the red couch when I heard that, so it must have been at the Pine Street apartment before Kiki moved out” etc). If your memory is messed up, and half those landmarks are missing or cross-wired, you have to do the best you can, and saying “I don’t remember anything after 1998” might just be a sort of workable fiction. You know it’s not exactly right, but it explains the rough scale of the problem in a way you and others can work with. It tells people you’re not a fully functional adult, and that you don’t remember stuff to the level of detail they would expect if if happened in the last decade or two. So, more of a shorthand than a lie.
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Seems like a strange case…if he was still around, would be something I’d expect Dr. Oliver Sacks to figure out (or dispel, based on @Scientist ’s findings)
Whether real or feigned or something in between, his poor family! I can’t even imagine living with that for a whole year.
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I had to sit with that for a minute. Suppression, that’s what I see there with this dude, especially as males in our society, we are taught Suppression of all feelings/emotion, this is the f’d up patriarch, this is the Man/Men way, this is our path we are shown/demanded of us. He’s just perverted it to survive, twisted it to maintain a life/survival, any life/survival. Something under that is brewing, and likely won’t be pretty when it comes out.
Nope, he ain’t normal, and neither are any of us, we’re all of us just trying to survive this mess we call life the best way possible with a smile, a small one, on our collective faces.
Time to go for a walk!
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I agree. Barring some physiological issue like a tumour, I read this as a psychotic breakdown manifesting in a suppression of not so much memories - but responsibilities.
In the bad old days - it’d be off to the sanitarium but perhaps with some modern therapy things can slowly return to whatever passes for normal.
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Yeah, I’m also wondering how much of the characterization of his mental state is down to the people around him describing the situation rather than his own description of what’s going on. (Not that he’s a reliable narrator of his own fractured mental state, either, if he’s suffering brain damage.) He’s creating workable fictions to have something to grasp hold of, and those are further being turned into neater narratives by those around him trying to understand - or report on - the situation.
And apparently the source for this story is The Daily Mail, so even if it’s actually (vaguely) based on fact, and they didn’t fabricate it entirely, they’ve created another layer of fiction divorced from what’s actually going on, that better fits fictional depictions of amnesia. So gods only know what the real story is here.
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It’s the best possible situation for someone suffering from this malady to wake up in the bed of his wife and have her look after him and help remember. Could you imagine someone like this waking up single in a studio apartment all alone. By the way, it’s interesting that he likens his experience to getting drunk and hooking up with random strangers–at 16 years old.
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This.
Hard to imagine that this is purely psychogenic. I wonder if there’s been a case study paper on this guy.
Also, ugh. Being a teen again is the last thing I’d ever want.
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Yes, isn’t it? It’s very sad for the persons involved. But scientifically very interesting.
Also what could have caused it? My guess would be a blood clot or an aneurism or something else causing some of his neural cells to die off, in which case it would point to memories being stored in a certain location in the brain.
But of course we have to take this into account:
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What makes it strange is that it is neither classic anterograde or retrograde amnesia, so it suggest something more like a psychogenic/dissociative fugue, or just malingering (faking it). The reported amnesia symptoms don’t really match what the major psychological and neuropsych models suggest could reasonably happen.
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