Childhood head trauma and mental illness??????

I went and seen my therapist last week. We discussed the fact that since I was a child I had this delusion as she called it. I was terrified to get out of bed at night because in the dark I would see this black dog and after a few years it was gone. As an adult for the past 7 years I have seen this figure of this man who has skin as white as snow, eyes like a black void, long black nails, and black wings. But when the light is turned on there is nothing there. Also when I was a child I slept in a bed across from bunkbeds that I couldn't sleep on the bottom bunk or even across from it because to me it looked like the bed's mattress was rising and falling like breathing. The doc said it is probably Psychosis. I was sitting in bed at 5am yesterday morning talking to a friend who was beside me and I jumped back and screamed because it looked like there was a bat that flew right at my head. My friend turned on the light and there was nothing there. I was wondering if this Psychosis could be caused from a head trauma I got when I was around 5 years old. I tripped on the sidewalk and it my forehead so hard I blacked out. They took me to the er but instead of doing any xrays or anything like that they brought in the hospital social worker and asked if I was being abused. They told my mother I had a concusion and to give me tylenol. It wasn't long after that when these delusion started happening. Does anyone know anything about if childhood head traumas can cause Psychosis??? If you do please let me know.

I don't really know that much about it but I have had some experiences similar. I used to think my cupboards were moving.My mum said I fell off her bed at 5 months old....and once I thought I saw a hand come from the bottom of the bed to grab me..but I think it was in REM sleep stage.I was also cross eyed as a baby but it corrected itself. + have a condition called intracranial hypertension where the fluid gets caught behind my eyes...lumbar puncture fixes that..but unattended can cause blindness and color blindness for me.Other things for others. I also get a sound in my head when I try and sleep that sounds like a ferry engine...kind regards JoeyJulia.

<font color="#000088">It's possible. I remember once when I was little, I was riding my bike, and hit a pothole in the road, and my bike must have flipped over. All I remember is waking up on the road, and my head was cracked open, a neighbor had seen it and ran down to help me get home. She walked me home, which was only a few more houses down. And she said I had been on the road for a few minutes, out cold! She told my Mom, and my Mom actually got mad at me because she had a Church meeting to get to. So she just wrapped a towel around my head, and sat me on a chair, and told me to stay there until she got back from her meeting. Ofcourse I didn't, I called my friend down the street that was a Paramedic to come help me, and she came and saw my head and took me straight to the ER! I ended up with 5-6 stitches, and I had a pretty bad concussion. They called my Dad at work for consent to treat me,since I was a minor.
But later on, when I got older I started having weird dreams to, where it felt like something was trying to pull me off the end of my bed by my ankles, and I was actually frozen in fear to where I couldn't move. Then I would finally scream NO really loud, and I would wake up! But the weird part was that when I woke up, my legs were dangling off the bottom of the bed!
But,there WERE bruises on my ankles from where I had been grabbed in my dream!Pretty weird huh?
It scared the hell out of me!</font>

It's possible that a head trauma could effect the brain...I'm not sure about all you talk about...Just wanted to let you know that I read your post...keep talking to your therapist...

sounds like pseudo-hallucinations rather than delusions.

(you have insight fairly quickly into the fact that they aren't real)

do they tend to happen when you are feeling very anxious / wired??? that is relatively common... i would say that emotional stress induction would be a more likely explanation than head injury.

do you have olfactory hallucinations (funny smells)?
how about seizures?

(thinking a little about TLE - temporal lobe epilepsy)

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Anonymous said:
<font color="#000088"> But the weird part was that when I woke up, my legs were dangling off the bottom of the bed!
But,there WERE bruises on my ankles from where I had been grabbed in my dream!Pretty weird huh?
It scared the hell out of me!</font>

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The fact that your legs were dangling off the bed proves you were restless and this could have caused the bruising. You could have been kicking yourself or banged your ankles on the bed board or mattress.

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alexandra_k said:
sounds like pseudo-hallucinations rather than delusions.

(you have insight fairly quickly into the fact that they aren't real)


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Does having insight fairly quickly necessarily mean that one is not experiencing a delusion?

Or is one delusional for having the thought itself with the ability or not to have insight merely an indicator/ marker of severity?

A delusion is "an erroneous belief that is held in the face of evidence to the contrary" so one wouldn't know one was deluded, would have no insight.

Seeing something not there is hallucination and one may or may not accept its unrealness. Hallucinations can be the result of a head injury.

http://www.braininjury.com/symptoms.html

> Seeing something not there is hallucination and one may or may not accept its unrealness.

Though the DSM defines hallucination as an illusory percept that isn't recognized as illusory. Some theorists / clinician's use the term 'pseudohallucination' to refer to hallucinatory experiences that one knows are non-veridical.

But then the distinction between delusion and hallucination seems to break down, rather.

I think the difference is in persisting in belief even after it has been proven not to be so. If you think one of your teeth contains a receiver or transmitter from the CIA and that tooth is taken out and opened up/broken apart and none is found but you still say it is there, that is a delusion. Thinking you see a ghost (which, being a ghost it "disappears") it can't be proven whether or not it was there so that can be a hallucination. Someone here was hallucinating cats in restaurants, for example. She knew they were hallucinations but some others might believe they are real cats but since it couldn't be proved something wasn't there in the past that isn't there anymore now, that would be a hallucination. I think hallucinations are more about what was seen/heard/other sense rather than one's belief about what was seen/heard/other sense, which would be delusion.

Brina had the belief as a child that there was a black dog under her bed and that belief is what made her afraid to get out of bed. No one showing her that there wasn't a black dog could influence her belief. If she'd seen a black dog under her bed and now it was gone and she could get get out of bed, that would be hallucination but the belief the dog was there, when it was shown to her that it wasn't is delusion.

I do get that there is a fairly intuitive distinction between hallucination (illusory percepts) and delusions (false beliefs). I guess I just worry that when one attempts to characterize the distinction that it might well break down under pressure.

(Similar issues come up with the 'sensation' and 'perception' distinction).

Lets say that one says 'I hear the voice of my dead aunt mavis'.
Is that an indicator of a hallucination: Hearing a voice
Is that an indicator of a delusion: Believing that dead aunt mavis talked to one

My concern is that it might count as two criterion A symptoms...
But that that would surely be counting the same symptom twice...

> Brina had the belief as a child that there was a black dog under her bed and that belief is what made her afraid to get out of bed. No one
> showing her that there wasn't a black dog could influence her belief.

And therefore? She had delusions? And therefore what?

Anyone bother to wonder WHY she had such an idea? Anyone bother to explore that? Rather than only attach labels and feel satisfied?

Alex, I don't think one can have a delusion that Dear Departed Aunt Mavis talks to one because no one can know if Aunt Mavis is able to talk to one or not; people get squeamish around religion and whether or not one can "talk to" God, etc., so why not Aunt Mavis. I think delusions have to be proveable? All they could prove is that Aunt Mavis isn't talking to him/her right now, and if the person kept insisting she was, that would be the delusion (on top of the hallucination since it would be "hearing"-related)?

Pachy, Brina, telling her story, just starts there as a child with that delusion. I imagine her therapist might be trying to help her find why she had that or rather, what significance it had to her? But since the black dog no longer bothers her I don't know that that particular "problem" would be very explorable other than as a "beginning" of problems maybe, don't know. I don't know if young children know why they believe some things, or at least, I don't know if they're able to explain?

Labels are sometimes helpful as they can narrow and define a little, where to look for solutions? One can't work on a problem or difficulty very well until it can be seen and expressed clearly. Brina asked if her hallucinations could come from a childhood head trauma and yes, people with childhood head traumas can get hallucinations as a side effect. That's good to know versus deciding she's bipolar which also can produce hallucinations?

Maybe your imagination is more active in the dark? Someone explained that when you think you hear the phone ring when you're in the shower, but it didn't...that is a hallucination. Is your therapist a psychiatrist? If not, it wouldn't hurt to have a psychiatric evaluation, just to put your mind to rest.