Two Persisting Pathophysiological Visual Phenomena Following Psychological Trauma and Their Elimination With Rapid Eye Movements: A Possible Refinement of Construct PTSD and Its Visual State Marker

Abstract

This study reports practice-based clinical evidence related to observations of two novel pathophysiologic visual phenomena reported by certain patients to have persisted following the psychological trauma of an acute-fear experience. The initially obscure visual phenomena were initially investigated heuristically in psychiatric, psychological, and ophthalmic practices and subsequently characterized over 25 years.The first phenomenon:“A visual image of what had been seen and felt during the most frightening moment of an acute-fear experience is immediately stored abnormally, and subsequently recalled abnormally as an experiential hallucinatory-like visual-image and other sensory-memory flashback.” The second phenomenon:“An abnormality of vision of peripheral oscillopsia, persisting from the time of the same acute-fear experience.” The third phenomenon: “A high probability of stepwise simultaneous elimination of both visual phenomena follows the maneuver of repeatedly exposing each voluntarily evoked visual-image and other sensory memory to volitional rapid side-to-side eye movements, as per one aspect of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.This maneuver leaves the memory stored and recalled normally (i.e., nonexperientially) and vision oscillopsia-free.” Clinical features of patients with the visual phenomena are unique to each patient.The authors report further observations over 25 years on the wide spectra of difficulty, intensity, and/or obtrusiveness of each of the three visual phenomena and of three closely related clinical features. Relevant clinical findings pertaining to the visual phenomena in 100 recent consecutively referred patients are reported.The strong inference of these observations induces a schema: a further refinement of the construct posttraumatic stress disorder, together with a visual state marker.

Keywords

acute-fear experiences traumatic memory posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)peripheral oscillopsia experiential visual flashbacks rapid eye movements visual state marker

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