This denial, Dr. Berti said, was long thought to be purely a psychological problem. ‘It was a reaction to a stroke: I am paralyzed, it is so horrible, I will deny it,’ she said.
But in a new study, Dr. Berti and her colleagues have shown that denial is not a problem of the mind. Rather, it is a neurological condition that occurs when specific brain regions are knocked out by a stroke.
Patients deny the paralysis because a closely related region of the brain that is still intact appears to tell them that their bodies are responding normally.” (New York Times )
Dr Berti’s study really has little to say to the medical community or even the lay public. Whoever will think this is news after being familiar with Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, published in 1986?! And psychiatrists have never felt that the denial (and the related phenomenon of neglect) seen in stoke victims was a psychological problem; it fits none of the characteristics of psychological denial. Furthermore, denial of illness and the need for treatment, even in the face of profound dysfunction and inability to care for oneself, is frequently seen in some of the more severe psychiatric illnesses, notably schizophrenic conditions. I suspect these supposedly psychological cases too are caused by dysfunction in the specialized parts of the brain necessary for the recognition of dysfunction and debility.
