“I started to get really nervous,” said the 59-year-old. He even considered checking himself into “a psychiatric unit.” However, Sharrah had not “gone crazy” as he believed.
Victor Sharrah suffers from an extremely rare visual condition, which appears from one day to the next, causing people to see distorted faces for days and even years: prosopometamorphopsia (PMO).
Many people are afraid to mention their symptoms because “they worry that others will think the distortions are a sign of a psychiatric disorder,” says Brad Duchaine, professor of psychology and brain sciences at Dartmouth University and co-author of a study on the topic. .
It’s a problem that people often don’t understand.
Brad Duchaine, researcher
Doctors often confuse PMO with mental health problems such as schizophrenia or psychosis. And while there is overlap in some symptoms, a big difference is that PMO patients “don’t think the world is distorted, they realize there’s something different about their vision,” says Antônio Mello, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist at Dartmouth and another co-author of the study published in the scientific journal The Lancet.
In the study, for the first time, with Sharrah’s help, scientists were able to recreate in 2D images what patients see when they look at faces.
