Seeing things that aren't there doesn't mean you're losing your mind

Driving home after a long shift, a doctor kept seeing a man standing by the road. A second look, and it was a road sign. Chinelle Miller, an oncologist in Jamaica who also writes and makes films, asked herself whether she was losing her mind, then went looking for the answer. She explains what exhaustion does to perception, why grief can do the same thing, and the questions that separate a tired brain from a real warning sign.

⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:28 The oncologist writing a cancer screenplay
1:00 Why she refused to choose between medicine and art
1:50 We are pathologizing normal human experience
2:47 The man by the road who was never there
3:40 What her therapist told her
4:37 When a diagnosis becomes a buzzword
5:14 Why an online quiz cannot answer this
5:46 What a physiological hallucination actually is
6:26 Grief can bring this on too
6:46 What made them happen less often
7:59 The plastic bag that looked like a cat
9:21 The questions to ask yourself first
10:14 The red flags that mean call a professional
11:01 Take home messages

About this episode:
Chinelle Miller is a physician practicing oncology in Jamaica and a writer, photographer, and filmmaker currently bringing a screenplay about cancer into production. She wrote her KevinMD article after a stretch of late-night drives home from work during which she repeatedly saw a figure standing by the road, only to look again and find a tall sign. She describes thinking she might be losing her mind, taking the question to her own therapist, and being told that she was probably just tired and that rest matters. Her argument is that pop culture has trained all of us to reach for a label first, and that words like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder get thrown around as buzzwords when each has specific diagnostic criteria. She defines a physiological hallucination as perceiving a stimulus that is not there, something that can occur in ordinary states such as exhaustion and grief without signaling that anything is medically wrong. She also draws the line clearly: repeated identical images, voices, thoughts that do not make sense, or thoughts of harming yourself or others are reasons to bring this to a professional rather than settle it alone. She is blunt that having a characteristic of a thing is not the same as having the thing, and that the determination belongs to a clinician rather than to the person alone.

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#Hallucinations #MentalHealth #SleepDeprivation