Have you ever felt like you're reliving the past? A curious paper from Japan: ‘Time slip’ phenomenon in adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorders. Have you ever felt like you're...OK, sorry. I'll stop that.
The paper describes the cases of two young men with autism, who suffered from an unusual affliction - very vivid memories of a single past event. These recollections were so unpleasant that they led to outbursts of violence. In the first case, the event was somewhat traumatic in itself:
Case 1, a male patient, was 16 years old at the time of his first visit to our hospital. He had not shown any delay in language development but had been isolated and unable to make friends since his infancy... He had been bullied by a classmate when he was in the 8th grade; thereafter he refused to go to school and began to stay indoors.This is not, perhaps, very surprising and sounds a bit like post-traumatic stress disorder. The second case, however, is more mysterious because the event that was remembered was, in itself, completely trivial - someone throwing away a cigarette end:
One day, he clearly recalled the bullying incident that had occurred a few years earlier and re-experienced the feelings of fear and frustration as if he were once again experiencing that event. Thereafter, he often had similar experiences, even though he did not purposely intend to recall the event, and he became strongly distressed.
He and his family stated that the recalled content was always the same. He thought that the distress could only be relieved by obtaining revenge on the boy who had bullied him, and he visited the boy’s house with a knife. He was subsequently admitted to the emergency ward of our hospital.
Case 2, a male patient, was 27 years old at the time of his first visit. Since an early age, he had exhibited disturbed reciprocal sociality and did not have any close friendships. His interest was limited to collecting figures of comic characters. He began to be bullied during junior high school. He entered senior high school but quit during the second year. Thereafter, he tended to seclude himself at home.The authors end by saying that out of seven autistic patients who presented to their psychiatric emergency ward, no less than four of them experienced "time slips", though it's not clear how this was diagnosed and patients presenting to the emergency ward are a highly selected population - mostly people who have suddenly become violent or aggressive.
One day, he watched his neighbor discarding a cigarette butt in front of his home. Thereafter, he began to be annoyed by that memory. Almost every time he heard the voice of that neighbor or saw that man, he would leave his home and curse at the neighbor. His behavior became more violent and he eventually threatened the neighbor with a wooden sword.
The "time slip" phenomenon seems unknown outside of Japan. Google reveals that the only papers discussing it are Japanese. Is it something that only happens in Japan, like buru-sera? Are people with autism elsewhere experiencing this, and going unnoticed?
Tochimoto S, Kurata K, & Munesue T (2011). 'Time slip' phenomenon in adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorders: Case series. Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences PMID: 21489047
14 comments:
An early report of this phenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_I_Turned
I've noticed this in my son's behavior. He will occasionally, for no reasons visible to me, get extremely agitated and upset, then start asking questions or quoting word-for-word some dialogue of a long-past event, then he will work himself up into a frenzy and become prone to lashing out violently.
--Melissa G, who cannot seem to get any of my accounts to sign in today.
Happens to me regularly. It's a weird sensation because it's hard to tell were reality ends and memory begins. The two overlap or rather flow into each other. Luckily, in my case at least, i am aware of it and can snap out with a little effort and don't descent into acting out. Snapping out however gives a dizzying feeling as if your brain has to readjust as if you been spinned around a few times.
Uncomfortable, i can well imagine how it must be if you can't snap out.
There is another related phenomenon, where you enter in a kind of dissociative state. Feels the same, but in that state external stimuli are turned down to the point of hardly noticing them.
the distress could only be relieved by obtaining revenge on the boy who had bullied him, and he visited the boy’s house with a knife
Well, that particular bully has learned a valuable lesson.
Sounds like it's tied up with obsessional behaviour, ruminations and such?
Happens to my son as well (UK - severely autistic)
Can't believe no-one has commented about this - Martian Time Slip by Philip K. Dick, about a boy with autism who has exactly such time slips: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_Time_Slip.
A wonder how hard it would be to take a set of non-diagnostic symptoms of autism or any other mental health condition that have been observed in isolated cases, and then sit down with people in regular contact with the people who have the condition (and the individuals themselves) for a statistically significant sample to ask if they experience the non-diagnostic symptom.
While some of those would be coincidences, I'd have to think that a survey of that design would reveal a lot of interesting information that other studies, which are not looking for new symptoms in the same kind of systemic way, would miss and that some of the symptoms found to be at least as common as the diagnostic symptoms (or even more so) might be useful in inferring what is going on at a fundamental level.
Stage one could be an open ended inquiry about atypical things observed in already diagnosed individuals with a smaller sample (perhaps also matched by a gleaning from forums and message boards, interviews of experienced hands on practitioners, literature review, etc.), while stage two would survey the larger statistically significant population and also have an open ended comment section at the end should a stage three be desired.
For someone with the right connections to groups of practitioners this could be a pretty inexpensive study that might even be integrated into normal medical visits, and it could probably be completed in a few months.
The responses to the post seem to suggest that this particular symptom is much more widespread than the literature indicates, and I'm sure that non-diagnostic symptoms of a great many DSM-IV conditions are also out there.
A mix of non-diagnostic and diagnostic symptoms might also add power to cluster analysis with a goal of subtyping mental health conditions.
Ah, to be able to forget - such a natural gift!
Deep sleep and finally 'death' tops our ability to erase memory.
@andrew
Mostly among ourselves we adults (HFA) see ourselves not as being defective. (i partake in many AS boards) It annoys us to no end to being treated like that. There is a widespread antipathy amongst our group towards the medical profession who we consider mostly incompetent.
Were you to setup such an endeavor you might consider taking into account we see ourselves as being different in a positive way with annoying but minor eccentricities.
Often a professional tries to enter the discussion and gives the impression he descends from his high horse to talk to the natives. He/she then gets a good dose of reality and gives up.
Most of us HFA adults feel perfectly fine, and with the adolescents the profession does enormous harm by treating them as defective. It takes decades to overcome that.
As for the deep autists they will be very difficult to get coherent answers and such a 'research' will be mostly invalid for that reason.
@ petrossa
I am familiar with the neurodiversity view of HFA and personally make a point of favoring the term "condition" rather than "disorder" in almost all discussions of mental health, with the intent that "condition" is a more neutral description of a distinctive subset of neurodiversity than "disorder" which implies that something is broken and a bad thing.
Whatever box one puts HFA in, it surely is a good thing, rather than a bad one, to understand it better. In the same vein, for example, it is helpful to be aware of natural cognitive biases in areas like risk evalution for one's own good.
The sociology of psychiatry is such that once one develops a set of symptoms (call them characteristic behaviors or throught modes if you like) that are sufficient to establish a meaningful mental health condition cluster, that there is insufficient incentive to continue efforts to fully characterize what else might be part of the package, or to rigorously determine if the cluster is homogeneous as opposed to a cluser of subclusters. It is too easy to take the authoritative cluster for granted and without elaboration institutionally. Health insurance coding, governmental statistics gathering, professional guidelines like DSM, the ability to compare new research with past literature about similar conditions, and more all create intense inertia once a box is initially defined.
If one knows that time-slip is a common occurrence for an individual in the autism spectrum, it is something that one can be on the lookout for, and it is something one can consciously consider how to address when it comes up in daily life. If one doesn't know that one is missing knowledge that could be a useful tool in dealing with life and could grow confused about.
My basic view is that more research produces more knowledge produces more understanding, which is good for everyone involved.
From a neurodiversity perspective, it stands to reason that psychiatrists are going to establish criteria for mental health conditions that make life more difficult on balance, rather than criteria that have upsides, on balance, because they are living in the disease model and things that make your life better, by definition, aren't diseases. Thus, the kind of research that I suggest is particularly well suited to revealing traits associated with a mental health condition that are positive for the people who are part of that cluster of individuals. (By analogy, the ADHD diagnostic symptoms don't include "hyperfocus" despite the fact that this is a trait common to many people who have been diagnosed as being ADHD and those individuals often consider this to be a highly positive aspect of having the kind of brains that they do.) A more full description of the cluster of traits that seem to be found with a mental health condition has wide potential for benefit in terms of learning useful things about how the brain works at low levels of invasiveness and low research cost.
@andrew
I don't dispute the usefulness of actually involving autists in developing methods rather then talking over their heads. It's about time, i'm all for it.
I just wanted to point out that present day attitude of the profession is a patronizing one. Mostly professionals come to confirm their bias rather then really learn something.
Just recently one of our boards was granted a visit from a psychologist who informed a concerned mother that her son's autism was mostly her fault since it's a 'nurture' issue.
He got a royal tonguelashing and disappeared. Took us quite a while to reassure the mother that the guy talked BS.
Those people we can really do without.
I experience this sometimes ... I had thought it was just that I had a really good memory.
I think of it as a visual analogue to echolalia --- I often get a sound or phrase stuck in my head on repeat, and it takes considerable effort not to say the phrase or make the sound. These recurring memories --- which don't have to be autobiographical; some of my most vivid memories aren't things that happened to me at all, just things I saw --- are sort of like that. They'll be pictures that randomly spring into my mind, clear as if they were actually in front of me.
Most of them don't have any particular emotional significance, but I do also tend to ruminate on bad experiences.
I also have a terrible sense of time. I have never been able to tell how much time is passing, and often time seems to be moving too fast.
Also, I notice there's an earlier paper that first describes this, looking at a group of 120 autistic people and 66 developmentally disabled controls, and finding the time-slips to be much more common in the autistic people (23 of them were either having them, or had had them earlier in life, compared with just one of the controls).
That paper looks hella interesting, but sadly I can only read the first 400 words; the rest are in Japanese.
My daughter does this almost continuously. She lives in the past and relives events from her earliest childhool (she is now 19). It is one of her greatest problems. The events differ and sometimes entirely new ones crop up. A particular event tends to get stuck for a few days and then a new one will be remembered and relived. I feel that she is unable to forget things -- possibly related to sleep problems -- and so events do not disappear in the abyss of time but hang around. I've never seen it described before -- I had assumed it was so common no ne bothered to mention it. Sometimes (when it is something which made her cross) it is a big problem, when it is a happy event it is good and helpful
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