Aug

19

Mental Blocks.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

August 19, 2008 |

Blogger Jeannie has written quite a bit about being a parent of a child with Tourette’s syndrome, both on her new blog Special Needs Parent and children of a lesser god…(not). This reminded me of Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. In his introduction Sacks explains that this is a book devoted to neurological studies of right-hemisphere syndromes which, at the time he was writing, had been neglected in medical literature. He explains that they were rarely documented “as if such syndromes were somehow alien to the whole temper of neurology.” Tourette’s is a right-hemisphere syndrome. In the chapter “Witty, Ticcy Ray” Sacks gives a brief history of the first description of the syndrome by Gilles de Tourette, in 1885. He goes on to say,

In the years that immediately followed the publication of Tourette’s original papers many hundreds of cases of this syndrome were described–no two cases ever being quite the same…[I]t became clear that some people could ‘take’ Tourette’s, and accommodate it within a commodious personality, even gaining advantage from the swiftness of thought and association and invention which went with it, while others might indeed be ‘possessed’ and scarcely able to achieve real identity amid the tremendour pressure and chaos of Tourettic impulses.

Cases like Ray’s do contain some hope that, just because something is recognized as a disorder, it doesn’t have to be a negative thing. Ray worked a normal job during the week but was a drummer on the weekends and found that his Tourette’s actually gave him an advantage, allowing him to make quick improvisational leaps. (There are some who believe Mozart also had Tourette’s.) When Sacks prescribed medication Ray found that, while it was easier to get through the week, his drumming wasn’t as exciting, and they finally settled on Ray taking his medication during the week and going off it on the weekends–dividing his life, but in a positive way. While for some people Tourette’s is, literally, crippling, it can come as a surprise that something generally recognized as a disorder can have unexpected benefits.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. preciouschild on August 19, 2008 3:33 pm

    Thanks so much for bringing out such thought provoking thought on such a little understood condition.

    Although my son who suffers from Tourette’s is shy and tends to be reserved, my hope in homeschooling him during his 8th grade year (he does attend public school every day for band and an elective), is to spend one-on-one time in honing a couple of talents which are so unique to him (he’s an amazing storyteller and quite perceptive).

    Bravo, again, for doing your part in helping to spread the love - and I’m going right out to purchase that book - sounds like something I shld have in my arsenal.

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