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Can you relate to my brothers story?
I am afraid not. 14%  14%  [ 2 ]
Yes. 71%  71%  [ 10 ]
Yes and I am very scared.. 14%  14%  [ 2 ]
Total votes : 14

AmalieAmalieAmalie
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22 Aug 2014, 6:21 pm

Hello. I am doing some research for personal purposes, whereas I couldn't find allot of research nor anything that had been documented spesificly about this, it's really important for me and every response counts.

I know that allot of people that aren't on the spectrum tend to do this as well, but especially those of us who are on the spectrum and that's what I'm very very very interested in reading and hearing your experiences on, it's about "entering your own little world".

I know allot of us on the spectrum(not necessarily everyone) tend to enter our own little world where one can think so very deeply about a thing to extreme detail, becoming quite detatched from everything going on around us, entering our own little world. I'd like to know, what you think about? Do you ever philosophize, think allot about your existence, why you're here, enternity and so on? Have you ever felt an extreme emotional detatchment from everyone around you, as you're the only person in the world due to some sort of an inability to relate to others, just feeling very lonely like that? If you have I'm very interested in listening to what you've got to say.

The reason why I'm doing this is because I'm extremely afraid to lose my brother. He has High functioning autism and he's become more and more detatched from us lately, and it's brought him to tears as he is so afraid of his own thoughts, he wants it to stop because he's afraid he'll end up killing himself and others, he is afraid of himself. The first time he experienced this was when he used to philosophize allot as a child, the first time he felt this extreme emotional detatchment and just overall detatchment from the world he was eight, and he has been extremely afraid of it coming back as it got worse and worse when he grew older. The questions and thoughts that scared him was "How do I know this isn't just all up in my own mind?" "How do I know there are other people with individual thougts as I can't see what others think" "how do I know they are real", "how do I know they are not". And what else that really bothers him is enternity, he tells me thats the plot, that's what makes him feel this extreme emotional detatchment, because he feels like he has this deeper understanding of what it means. He is a fraid of his own mind.
From the research I've done I don't think this is Schizophrenia, I don't think it's psychosis, I don't think it's any dissociative disorder, but it DOES sound like a mixture of some dissociative disorder/asperger/psychosis. But he's afraid that because we couldn't find anything that perfectly described his situation they would reject him, not believe his thoughts were real, not understand him, cause he thinks this is all real that he just has a deeper understanding of the world and how things make sense he sees patterns in mathematics, physics, he just sees how everything (physics) make sense and so on, and I think this whole thing has something to do with his autism, because I know it's quite common autistic people develop these skills, or more common than it is for allistics.
[My brother used to detatch himself like this especially at night time where his thoughts would be come so overwhelming he some times passed out]
If you would be interested in telling me about your own experience on this please message me, feel free to make the message as long as you want. You can use my brothers story and the questions I asked earlier to help you write it? You can message me here on WrongPlanet, you can post a reply on the forum. This is extremely important to me, and extremely helpfull.



cberg
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22 Aug 2014, 7:12 pm

Autistic minds extrapolate potentiality - that is to say we view ourselves as amalgamations of everyone we could be. The way I see it, we on the spectrum don't live on 24 hour cycles; our thoughts compound and continue non-stop, for these very reasons I'm taking a break from my social life for the moment, electing instead to keep up with several long-time friends and work to sharpen my programming abilities, as well as find work again. Somewhat recently, my parents decided that my myopic focus on technology amounted to manic obsession, which is really just a synaptic way of saying I've become better at thinking in abstractions and code than spoken or otherwise conventional human language. I'd be lying if I told you media frenzies portraying Autistics as dangerous and unstable don't contribute to this stress; that's a large part of it honestly, most of us on the spectrum want to work for more peace, advancement and freedoms in the world and it really gets us down when people interpret our perceptions and emotions as disingenuous. The human brain is composed of constantly-shifting charge balances between cortexes, in Autistic brains the visual cortex is considered most active. For me, this means that sometimes the best way of communicating with everyone comes in the form of introspection; knowledge that I must allow everyone in my life time to make their own decisions about what's going on in my mind so we can all gain some perspective and I can project more love and understanding to all ~7 billion of my family.

I think this is indicative of a wider perceptual shift than one that only affects the Autism spectrum; people absorbed by thoughts such as your brother or myself are still humans and I believe what we really want to convey is that separation - be it of ideals, miscommunication, emotions or even simply physical distance is a very difficult illusion for anyone. No matter what people believe about one another, we're all distinctly similar in what we're capable of feeling and seeing. When people try to disappear from each other's lives is usually when they become closest of all. Your brother is immersed in the feelings of your entire family, it seems to me he & I might share a condition known as alexithymia; it's a neurological term meaning it's difficult for us to distinguish individual emotional states, to me it feels like I'm experiencing everyone's thoughts and feelings, making it a very high-paced guessing game to anticipate how to respond to my situational reality.


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22 Aug 2014, 7:17 pm

Let me preface this by saying that while I am often so enguaged by my own thoughts that I don't realize what's going on around me, I'm not scared by that. Also, I've found myself contemplating the same things your brother is wondering about.

Quote:
"How do I know this isn't just all up in my own mind?" "How do I know there are other people with individual thougts as I can't see what others think" "how do I know they are real", "how do I know they are not"


It sounds to me like he just came across a concept known as "subjective idealism" or "mentalism" and took it to the logical extreme known as "solipsism". Both I and an old friend of mine have stayed up all night before wondering about just this and the implications of it. There are a lot of books and scholarly articles on the subject that you should be able to find. My old philosophy textbook has this to say on the subjects of subjective idealism and solipsism:

Quote:
This theory of perception was proposed by George Berkeley, an eighteenth-century Irish philosopher. Dissatisfaction with the proposition that there are two seperate realities is shown in the effort to develop a monistic theory-one based on the conviction that there is but one underlying reality. Berkeley agreed with Locke that all we can know are the idea produced by sensations, but Berkeley raised a crucial question: If all we can know are the ideas produced by sensations, what possible ground do we have for inferring the actual existence of external objects that cause sensations in the first place? How can we be sure that our ideas "copy" anything at all?

Berkeley could find no justification for asserting the independant existance of objects or external things. All that we percieve are sensations from which our minds construct ideas. Perception is viewed as the process by which sensations are enterpreted and organized by the mind to produce ideas. Ideas are all that the mind has to work with. The reasoning mind arranges and relates the ideas in a pattern of perception. Berkeley argued that what a person percieves as "real" is made up entirely of ideas in the mind. His conclusion is summarized in what has become a famous maxim of the subjective idealists: "To be is to be percieved".

If subjective idealism is carried to an extreme and proposed as a theory of perception applying it to a single individual-to the one subjec who percieves-it results in what philosophers call solipsism. This position maintains that there is only one perciever-myself. Therefore, reality is limited to what I, the solipsist, percieve it to be. The world ceases to exist when I, the only percieving subject, stop thinking about it. To most people this position appears fantasic and excessive, so to avoid the excesses of solipsism the cautious subjective idealist on some outside source for ideas.


After that is starts talking about what Berkeley thought about God, gives some pertainant quotes and then explains a couple common critiques of subjective idealism. Please forgive any typos, but I hate having to type things out of books and try to get it over with as quickly as possible. Anyway, it seems to my like this is what your brother is talking about. It doesn't mean that he's insane, just that he's considering a question that philosophers have asked for centuries. As for the fear of him killing himself or someone else, that sounds quite serious, but I don't see how that could possibly be related to these types of philosophical musings. As previously stated, I've stayed up at night before wondering about these types of things. However, I've never worried about myself going out and hurting someone as a result.

I really hope this information was useful to you, but from the way you describe the situation, I think he may benefit from seeing a psychologist (though, not necessarily a phychiatrist. There IS a difference. You go to a psychologist for advice & a psychiatrist for drugs)



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22 Aug 2014, 7:58 pm

I have thought thoughts like these, but I try to keep them under control. Thinking the thoughts is not necessarily the problem. It is that the thoughts are so big and completely overwhelming. It's like getting sucked into a vortex. I have to be "ready" for those kinds of thoughts in order to entertain them. I have had to learn how to shut them down, a form of self-control for me.

At one point, I realized that we might all call something "red", but since I can't get into your brain and see what you are seeing and you can't get into my brain to see what I am seeing, we might not even see the same color. But, whatever color we each independently see is what we have agreed to call "red", regardless of what it actually is. If I let myself go on from there and begin to contemplate all aspects of how we know what is really reality, I can get lost.

I don't think it is psychosis. But it is a bit like getting lost in space and being untethered to earth. You become afraid of not being able to find your way back home, which can cause some serious anxiety.

Being firmly rooted and feeling "tethered" has become more important to me than contemplating these enormous mysteries, so I don't think about them so often anymore. However, thinking about them can bring about some amazing insights, if you don't get lost.

Your brother is definitely not alone in thinking these philosophical thoughts.



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22 Aug 2014, 8:12 pm

I second Nerdygirl unequivocally.

Your brother's thoughts have the potential to be really productive thoughts, should you, or somebody, or even himself, would provide a way to "tether" those thoughts.

The spacewalk metaphor is excellent. If he is tethered to the ship, performing essential research while in "unknown" regions, he becomes productive; if he is untethered, he basically gets literally lost, perhaps permanently.

There's an old David Bowie song, "Space Oddity," which has a guy named "Major Tom," who becomes untethered and eventually disappears in space. I'm not sure if your brother should listen to this song--I wonder, though, if listening to it could make "Space Oddity" a "cautionary tale"--of what happens when one loses contact with reality.

I would tell your brother not to give up. He might have some important insights within his seeming philosophically "ramblings." I hope you could find someone who understands this, and helps your brother channel his thoughts toward productive uses.



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22 Aug 2014, 9:15 pm

I don't know what the professional term for those thoughts are, but I have the same pattern. I get obsessed with negative fantasies. I have been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I have always been this way, so I didn't know it had a name. I've been taking medicine for it for a little over a year. I am able to snap out of those thought loops now, whereas before I would be terrify myself with my thoughts.



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22 Aug 2014, 10:23 pm

His thinking sounds solipsistic, which has been associated with the schizophrenia spectrum by phenomenological researchers.


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22 Aug 2014, 11:25 pm

This might be of interest:

http://homepage1.nifty.com/t-watanabe/S ... AAMversion[2].pdf


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23 Aug 2014, 8:37 am

I used to think about those things in bed at night, too, but I found the contemplations blissful. (Religious mystics cultivate the experience your brother is having on purpose, to quiet the conscious mind by overwhelming it with the infinite.) It was a pleasure to me to find out as I got older that others had contemplated these things before me. Philosophy, and particularly metaphysics, addresses the very questions that vex your brother, and even if it doesn't offer definitive solutions it's a comfort. Read some Gnosticism, watch "The Matrix", dig some Philip K. Dick and you will know you are in good company wondering about this stuff.

In the end, I decided even if everything was a giant simulation it was best to ACT AS IF it were real but not take any of it too seriously. ;) Maybe your brother can do the same, especially if you do something to help remove his anxiety. Xanax or cannabis might help there. He may also be suffering from what's called "existential depression"--Google the phrase and see if he relates to any of the descriptions of that diagnosis.



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24 Aug 2014, 5:48 am

arielhawksquill wrote:
He may also be suffering from what's called "existential depression"--Google the phrase and see if he relates to any of the descriptions of that diagnosis.


Wow! Never heard of that before. Describes me at age 11 onwards perfectly! I used to bore my school friends with my ponderings on the universe, life, death, existence and the nature of physical objects versus mental constructs. I used to argue that it is very important to know why we are alive so we know what sort of life to lead. Is God real? Are ghosts and the supernatural real? I spent my entire teenage and beyond engrossed in these things.


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25 Aug 2014, 10:15 am

Aw, I'm sad this thread died, it was interesting. I hope the OP comes back and tells us what he did with all this information.



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26 Aug 2014, 8:39 pm

TallyMan wrote:
arielhawksquill wrote:
He may also be suffering from what's called "existential depression"--Google the phrase and see if he relates to any of the descriptions of that diagnosis.


Wow! Never heard of that before. Describes me at age 11 onwards perfectly! I used to bore my school friends with my ponderings on the universe, life, death, existence and the nature of physical objects versus mental constructs. I used to argue that it is very important to know why we are alive so we know what sort of life to lead. Is God real? Are ghosts and the supernatural real? I spent my entire teenage and beyond engrossed in these things.


i can relate in a deep way.
i, however, do not fear my mind or these topics......i revel in them.