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The Neurologic Disorders in Film
Published in Eelco F. M. Wijdicks, Neurocinema—The Sequel, 2022
The film claims that antidepressants cause violent behaviors during sleep, an exceedingly uncommon side effect. Violent behaviors during sleep are well known and may have dramatic implications including homicide, non-fatal assaults but also sexual misconduct. Sleepwalking is usually benign in children, but in adults, it can become quite harmful, with not only destruction of property, but also serious injury to bed partners or others. Sexsomnia is a form of parasomnia characterized by atypical and often violent or injurious sexual behavior during sleep. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has clear criteria for somnambulism that include persistence of sleep or impaired judgment during ambulation and a disturbance not better explained by other disorders, drug use, or substance-use disorder. A leading textbook of sleep medicine mentions that sleep specialists are increasingly asked to evaluate potential court cases where violent behavior might be the result of a sleep disorder.39 Connecting violence with an underlying sleep disorder is far more difficult, although the literature suggests some criteria such as (1) previous episodes and documented sleep disorder, (2) arousal stimulus, (3) no attempt to escape, (4) amnesia for the event, and (5) precipitating factors such as recent sleep deprivation and newly introduced medication.40
Sleep–Wake Disorders
Published in Philip B. Gorelick, Fernando D. Testai, Graeme J. Hankey, Joanna M. Wardlaw, Hankey's Clinical Neurology, 2020
Margaret Kay-Stacey, Eunice Torres-Rivera, Phyllis C. Zee
The majority of individuals with disorders of arousal do not have an underlying pathology. However, the underlying mechanism is thought to be an interplay between genetic factors and environmental triggers. Genetics are important in all disorders of arousal. Somnambulism has a strong familial pattern in first-degree relatives. Environmental triggers can lead to microarousals, sleep fragmentation, or changes in NREM sleep architecture. Some examples are alcohol, stress, medications, illegal drugs, external stimuli (e.g. noise), or internal stimuli (e.g. sleep disorder of breathing).
Parasomnias
Published in Stanley R. Resor, Henn Kutt, The Medical Treatment of Epilepsy, 2020
Classical childhood somnambulism is characterized by sleepwalking episodes, which usually occur in deep non-REM sleep. Typically, sleepwalking in children is a self-limited, developmental phenomenon without attendant somatic illness or psychopathology. A family history of sleepwalking or night terrors is usual, suggesting a genetic predisposition.
Conscious intelligence is overrated: The normative unconscious and hypnosis
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2022
Joel Weinberger, Mathew Brigante, Kevin Nissen
What is said to happen in hypnosis has also undergone alterations over time. Mesmer referred to crises, characterized by convulsions and other uncontrollable physical outbursts. He thought that these effects were attributable to a mysterious and invisible magnetic fluid transmitted from the magnetizer to the patient. The next great figure in the history of hypnosis, Puységur, largely dispensed with Mesmer’s physical explanation in favor of a psychological one. He posited an unconscious relationship (rapport) between somnambulist and patient. This special rapport resulted in a sleep like state (somnambulism) during which the patient had access to a higher-order mind. This idea of a second, higher level, mind, led some to posit a mystical connection between somnambulist states and nature. Somnambulism was seen as a conduit for exploring the ineffable.1Contemporary clinicians may recognize Puységur’s “rapport” as a precursor of the therapeutic alliance. As a result, what came to be known as hypnosis (thanks to Braid) took on a romantic cast and became something no respectable scientist would pursue. Eventually, hypnosis gained back some respectability when Charcot, as well as Liebault and Bernheim jettisoned its connection to mysticism and posited a naturalistic, scientific basis to hypnotism. Instead of a means to explore the supernatural, it was again employed as a clinical tool (Ellenberger, 1970; Weinberger & Stoycheva, 2020).
Stephanus Bisius (1724–1790) on mania and melancholy, and the disorder called plica polonica
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2021
Eglė Sakalauskaitė-Juodeikienė, Paul Eling, Stanley Finger
What is particularly interesting here is that, when it came to the interpretation of plica, Bisius did not try to placate the clergy (p. 34). Unlike what he had to say about patients with mania or melancholy possibly getting better with “help from God,” there was nothing about how tempore & patientia cum Dei auxilio might assist patients trying to overcome this condition. On the contrary, Bisius mentioned gullible and imaginative priests (along with deceitful old women) as reasons for the current state of ignorance about the disorder, which he boldly claimed was most likely a state of an impressionable mind, rather than a “real” (physical) disease of the nerves, brain, or even hair.Somnambulism, another disorder without physical markers, had also been attributed to witchcraft in the 1600s, as evidenced in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” For more on the history of somnambulism and its transition from metaphysics to a disorder of nature, see Umanath, Sarezky, and Finger (2011).
Hypnotizability and the Natural Human Ability to Alter Experience
Published in International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 2021
The ability-to-alter-experience model requires no particular state of consciousness – hypnotic or otherwise – for a person to use his or her natural ability to alter experience. This is not a new idea. Nearly a hundred years ago, Young (1925) proposed an understanding of hypnotic responding that is quite similar to the ability-to-alter-experience model: The differences which appear in somnambulism are differences in the constitution of the persons involved; and would be better described, perhaps, merely as individual differences in normal persons than as differences between the normal and the hypnotic states as such. (Young, 1925, p. 232)