All in the Mind
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Well, most folks know I was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic from a child. The illness I have gives schizophrenic like symptoms. Hence part of the medical confusion. But, the experience of schizophrhrenia has been created in virtual reality. Click Here for full story. (Intro below) Of course ever having the label schizoprhenic is not useful or helpful to anyone. Some folks heare the word and think you must be a raving loonie. Others don't believe you can hear voices that no one else can, so by implication, you are making it up and are a liar. Which is real nice when one may be being tormented by the voices at the time. And other folks think the voices must be those of demons. Well, it is like living with demons, but any one has a good whack on the head, they could basically hear things that others cannot for a time. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
On the Southern coast of Sedig, a medical doctor recreates the nightmarish experience of schizophrenia...
The fear of wrong things begins as a spidery prickle on the back of your neck. You feel a sweet chill, as it begins to skitter up your skull, then becomes a soft, sickly expanding pressure in your chest. This isn’t the kind of fear you feel from most computer games; it’s not like the jack-in-the-box shock you get, for example, when an animated ghoul pops its head out from behind a dark corner. This is a cloying, helpless, desperate panic, and it’s no fun at all.
The Virtual Hallucinations building arrived on Sedig's southern shoreline a few days ago (coordinates: 45, 25), but I had a chance to visit the place in August, when the building resided on a private island owned by the medical research arm of a California university. The brainchild of Nash Baldwin—“Nash”, named after John Nash of A Beautiful Mind, for reasons that’ll soon become obvious—the building contains a closely researched recreation of visual and aural hallucinations, based on interviews of real schizophrenics. Baldwin transplanted the simulation to Second Life's public continent, to give residents a chance to try it out, and to collect their feedback afterward (there’s a survey-taking device at the end of the tour), and as I first watched residents enter the doors, yesterday, I wondered if they’d feel the same kind of terror I did, last month.
Fred Extraordinaire, a tall goth with red hair, re-emerges from the building, and pronounces himself “sickened.”
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