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What's "normal" and what is HPPD?


Chiggs17

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Let me start of by saying I definitely have HPPD, some things are clearly not normal and it's fairly obvious. On the other hand I have a habit of seeing perfectly normal things as symptoms on a regular basis, when I ask other people if they can see them they say yes, and I then know that it's a normal physiological response. I'm curious to see if anyone has noticed things that are perfectly that they may have thought were HPPD symptoms. This does not include say floaters which we all have but are much more noticeable for those of us with this disorder.

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That's definitely true. Halos are another one, I think we all see halos around streetlights, it's just that for some they are much more intense. I would consider my halos within the normal range. What about trails and afterimages? Waving your phone around in the dark should produce some trails even to someone without HPPD no? And some afterimages are normal. That's the one I struggle with the most, are my after images within the normal range or not? Of course everybody experiences some after imaging.

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That's definitely true. Halos are another one, I think we all see halos around streetlights, it's just that for some they are much more intense. I would consider my halos within the normal range. What about trails and afterimages? Waving your phone around in the dark should produce some trails even to someone without HPPD no? And some afterimages are normal. That's the one I struggle with the most, are my after images within the normal range or not? Of course everybody experiences some after imaging.

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I've had visual snow for as long as I can remember, and perhaps some minor DR/DP since I started smoking pot heavily in high school. But I've definitely never had halos and I still don't even know what starbursting is, which I'm pretty sure I don't have even now with HPPD. 

 

The crazy thing about HPPD is that many of the symptoms are things we see normally, as the poster points out. HPPD just seems to exaggerate these symptoms to the point they're unbearable. 

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Bugger my after images are like if I'm looking at the professor for awhile while she's giving a lecture and I move my eyes an imprint of her will be visible. If I'm staring at anything for any period of time some image of it will be visible for a bit of time after I look away. It's nothing really distinct. Like I said it could be perfectly normal.

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Yeah chiggs I'm exactly the same, I got the after images of my lecturers last year that were noticeable but not concerning... My neurologist said that it's a natural phenomenon and anxiety/stress brings it up. The moment I stopped looking for them, the better they got.

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I think that's kinda downplaying the suffering and pain of a lot of people with HPPD to say it's just anxiety that's entirely distorting their vision. Like a lot of people with HPPD, I was well aware of how my vision functioned before this and how terrible it is now. Did I have afterimages after staring at a TV or the sun or a computer screen or other bright objects for a long time? Perhaps. Did extremely fast objects blur together a bit? Of course. But again, this is natural. What's not natural is when cars driving 30 miles per hours blur together or when I catch a very brief nanosecond glimpse of the sun and have an afterimage for a minute or to later. That is not normal. And it has only happened since after I took acid and acquired HPPD. But to say my symptoms or the problems of others are due simply to a rise in anxiety rather than a chemical malfunction in the brain due to drug use is generalizing to an insane degree. I had anxiety prior to HPPD and never once did objects blur together or did I get minute-long afterimages for glancing at the sun. 

 

I think the problem here is that your HPPD is much different than other people's and visa versa. This is well documented. Everyone has a different form of HPPD because everyone has a different body chemistry and took a different amount and type of drug to get to this point. I, for example, have terrible "frame rate" problems and macropsia. Other people don't have either of these and instead have severe afterimages or starbursting. Though I don't have starbursting I don't tell those people it's just their anxiety that's causing it. 

 

The bottom line is that while many of us have had these symptoms before we're all also very well aware of how severe and unnoticeable they were before as opposed to now. People who've been living in their own bodies and minds for decades are quite familiar with how they felt prior to HPPD and how they felt after acquiring it. When my symptoms get to a point to where they are unnoticeable again (i.e., "normal") then I will consider myself free of HPPD -- not free entirely of those symptoms, but free of their severity, which again, is what characterizes HPPD.  

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I don't think you really read my post very carefully. I would never downplay the suffering we endure. All I was trying to say is that on top of the numerous things that occur that aren't supposed to, sweeping trails of my arms, movement of stationary objects etc, the anxiety that many (not all) experience causes us to be concerned about things that are in fact normal. I can't speak for anyone else with HPPD but prior to it I didn't pay a bit of attention to any visual anomalies I may have had, consequently I'm always paranoid that normal things are symptoms, causing more anxiety. I made this post really just to see if we could identify things that are normal physiological responses and perhaps ease our minds a bit.

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No worries I think you just misunderstood what I was trying to say. I mean maybe I'm wrong but for somebody like me (and others) with mild-ish HPPD part of the problem is obsessing over things that in fact could be perfectly normal. If we could separate the true symptoms from physiological responses maybe we could gain a small amount of piece of mind.

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