Psychosis

Dr Rob returns to explain post-partum psychosis, Capgras delusion, Fregoli delusion, alien hand syndrome, wendigo psychosis, koro syndrome, Paris syndrome, reduplicative paramnesia, Alice in Wonderland syndrome, plus loads of pop culture.

Music: “I’m Losing My Mind Over You” by Al Dexter

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Charity

Canadian Mental Health Association

17 Responses

  1. Fugue statement: “Sorry I’m late, I just got here, and I can’t remember how or why”

    What do you call a dress on your mother “a Freudian Slip”

  2. Great episode guys! As soon as you started mentioning hallucinations, it made me think of the opening scene of A Scanner Darkly, based on a Philip K Dick novel; a guy is hallucinating about bugs in his apartment, and it’s wonderfully rendered in a cartoon-esque kind of way (not sure what you call the effect – Kevin, help me here).

    I recently watched Shutter Island, which was another trippy reality-questioning movie. 7.5/10 from me. :o)

  3. They got a decent episode or two out of word salad during the early seasons of that David Kelley series, Boston Legal. Seeing a smart-ass lawyer who typically ran rings around the competition reduced to shaking his head in total incomprehension of what was going on (“Not the years sixty when classic electrons are free?”) was pretty fantastic at first, but it was played for cheap laughs as the show fell into self-parody later on.

    And for breaks with reality in ’60s cinema, I’ll take Polanski’s Repulsion any time, especially those creepy freakin’ walls.

  4. Alien Hand Syndrome – does the handedness of the person have any effect on whether it’s the left or right hand that gets alien-ified?

  5. Alright, about Aronofsky’s Black Swan, Portman doesn’t go crazy, she’s just a method actor. Or at least that’s what I thought. I work in theatre and method actors actually can get to acting crazy, it’s not them anymore. The theory to method acting is that you not only step into the character’s shoes, you step into them, their skin, you become them. The scariest experience I had was when an actor was in the bathroom cutting himself to stain his shirt with blood, because somebody had screwed up and washed the fake blood off. So now I’m wondering, are actors who imerse themselves in method acting suffering from some kind of psychosis?

    P.S. Love the show, you guys are some of my favorite Canadians!

  6. Something else about the Andrea Yates case.
    I read articles at the time that talked about the medications she was given during some of her hospitalizations. She was given some wicked drug cocktails. It was almost like they figured they had this really whacked out lady so let’s experiment on her. She was given drugs that were not supposed to be taken concurrently. Even the nurses that were taking care of her thought she was being treated very badly.
    This might have contributed to the eventual outcome of her illness.

    1. We are acutely aware that David Fincher directed Fight Club, but Terry Gilliam directed 12 Monkeys. If there was some confusion during the episode as to who was gave credit for what, I assure you that was completely unintentional.

      I think we can all agree that both are great, the movies and the directors.

      1. Yeah, we totally knew that stuff.

        Terry Gilliam’s the one that got stuck on that island with Skipper and the Professor, right?

  7. I once had a co-worker who lived with the delusion that his parents along with ‘the military’ had impregnated him and then surgically altered his sex so he was left with a dead baby inside his body (which is to say, he believed he was biologically female). during one of his bad periods he lifted up his shirt and announced that a scar on his stomach was ‘the mark of truth!’ i don’t know if it was a legitimate surgical scar he had reinterpreted into ‘the military’s’ handiwork or if he had… you know… tried to cut something out of an organ he didn’t have in his body. poor fella.

  8. Just rewatched an episode of Star Trek: DS9 with what seems like a pretty good example of a psychotic break. Season 6, episode 11 titled “Waltz.” Gul Dukat goes crazy and starts talking to hallucinations. I was wondering if Dr Rob thought this was a good portrayal of a psychotic break. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Waltz_(episode)