From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <post.nul>
Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:27:14 -0500
Archived: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:27:14 -0500
Subject: Ghostly Faces And Visions Of 'Little People'




Source: The Daily Mail - London, England, UK

http://tinyurl.com/crr9ur

03rd February 2009


Ghostly Faces And Visions Of 'Little People': The eye disorder
that leaves thousands of Britons fearing they've lost their
senses

By Morag Preston


Following his wife's death six years ago, David Stannard has
become accustomed to spending quiet evenings alone at his home
in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.

So it came as a surprise to the 73-year-old when he looked up
from his television one evening to discover he was sharing his
living room with two RAF pilots and a schoolboy.

'The pilots were standing next to the TV, watching it as if they
were in the wings of a theatre,' he says.

'The little boy was in a grey, Fifties-style school uniform. He
just stood there in the hearth looking puzzled. He was 18 inches
high at most.'

Mr Stannard's guests never said a word and vanished after 15
minutes. That night, he says, the walls of his house, which had
always been white, looked as though they had been redecorated in
patterned wallpaper with a brickwork effect.

The next morning he was caught off-guard again when he found a
fair-haired girl standing on his sofa. She also appeared to be
from the Fifties, but was life-size, wearing a short skirt and
pink cardigan, with chubby knees, white ankle socks and ribbons
in her hair.

'I watched her for a while,' he says. 'She didn't move much.
Then she was gone.'

It would be easy to dismiss Mr Stannard's story as the bizarre
imaginings of an elderly mind. Fortunately, he knew he wasn't
losing his mind; neither was his house haunted.

A few weeks earlier he had been registered blind, though he was
still able to watch television if he sat at a certain angle.
He'd been warned that as his eyesight deteriorated, he might
experience visual hallucinations in the form of Charles Bonnet
Syndrome (CBS).

'I was lucky enough to know what it was,' he says, 'otherwise I
would have thought I was going bonkers.'

An estimated 100,000 people in the UK have CBS, but many won't
realise it because the condition remains something of a mystery.

The real number is probably higher because sufferers are often
too ashamed to talk about what they have seen for fear of being
considered crazy.

The late historian Lord Dacre of Glanton, formerly Hugh Trevor-
Roper, was unusual among CBS patients in that he talked openly
about what he jokingly referred to as his 'phantasmagoria'.

He would see horses and bicycles racing, and whole landscapes
whizzing by as if he were on a train. On one occasion, he found
himself trapped in an apparently endless tunnel.

Hallucinations tend to have common themes: simple geometric
patterns, disembodied faces with jumbled features, landscapes,
groups of people, musical notes, vehicles and miniature figures
in Victorian or Edwardian costume. They can be in black and
white or colour, moving or still, but they are always silent.

The condition was named after Charles Bonnet, an 18th-century
Swiss natural philosopher whose grandfather had seen people,
patterns and vehicles that were not really there. Bonnet was the
first person to identify that you could have visual
hallucinations and still be mentally sound.

The condition can affect anybody at any age with diminishing
eyesight. Even people with normal vision can develop it if they
blindfold themselves for long enough.

But most people who have CBS have it as a side-effect of age-
related macular degeneration  -  the most common cause of
blindness in the UK. It is thought that up to 60 per cent of
patients with severe vision loss develop CBS.

Crucially, CBS is caused by lack of visual stimulation rather
than mental dysfunction.

Usually, on opening our eyes, the nerve cells in the retina send
a constant stream of impulses to the visual parts of the brain.
If the retina is damaged, the stream of impulses reduces, but  -
  rather than lie dormant  -  other parts of the brain become
hyperactive.

So when the brain isn't receiving as many pictures as it is used
to, it builds its own artificial images instead from the areas
we use every day to process faces, objects, landscapes and
colours.

What you hallucinate depends on which part of the brain these
increases are located. But why only a proportion of patients
with macular degeneration experience hallucinations is still
unknown, or why younger patients with macular degeneration are
less likely to have CBS than older ones.

Dr Dominic Ffytche, a senior lecturer at the Institute of
Psychiatry, is a leading expert on CBS. He has been at the
forefront of a campaign led by the Royal College of
Ophthalmologists and The Macular Disease Society calling for eye
doctors to warn patients with macular degeneration that they may
develop CBS.

He says: 'In our experience, forewarning and knowledge of the
possibility of hallucinations helps patients cope when they
occur. It allows them to realise this indicates a functional
problem with their sight and not a problem with their mind.'

In 2003, Sandra Jones, 54, a former TV producer, thought she was
losing her mind when she started seeing faces looming towards
her out of nowhere.

Having visited various massacre sites, including Rwanda, as part
of her job, she assumed it was a form of post-traumatic stress
disorder.

'Part of me thought this was payback time,' she says.

The faces would swirl off the pages of the book she was reading,
or appear in front of her computer screen. It would happen three
or four times a day, usually when she was feeling relaxed or
trying to get to sleep.

'Some nights I couldn't lose them and I would only get an hour's
sleep,' she says. 'Closing my eyes wouldn't help, so I'd get up
and clean my house just to keep moving. I got the feeling that
if I was tired, it would help me fall asleep, which would then
free up my mind.'

She didn't dare tell friends or anyone at work for fear of
jeopardising her job, and found out about CBS only after
researching her symptoms online. Earlier that year she had been
diagnosed with Sorsby's fundus dystrophy, a rare genetic eye
condition which causes early onset macular degeneration, but
nobody had warned her that hallucinations might be a side-
effect.

'The unpleasant feeling was of not being in control,' she says.
'Once they are identified, they are not a problem.'

Hallucinations can last from only a few seconds to several
hours. In a minority of unlucky cases, they are continuous
throughout the day. Patients usually have several daily before
they taper off to once a week, then once a month.

For 60 per cent of patients, they will stop entirely after 18
months. There has not yet been a long-term study, but some
patients report having them for at least three years.

Part of Dr Ffytche's research involves looking into ways
patients can stop the hallucinations. 'There won't be a single
recipe for everyone,' he says. 'But hallucinations tend to occur
when you are in a state of drowsy wakefulness, so you want to
rouse yourself.'

As the condition is caused by a lack of stimulation in the
visual part of the brain, one of the techniques he is
investigating is stimulating the fingertips.

This is based on the fact that studies of brain scans of sight-
impaired people reading Braille show increased activity in that
area. The theory is that even feeling a dice with dimples could
bring visions to a halt.

Other techniques include holding your breath; turning on a light
if it is off, or vice-versa; standing up if you are sitting
down; and moving your eyes. In extreme cases, medication is
used. But the drugs can have side-effects such as tremors,
drowsiness, sickness and diarrhoea.

Dr Winfried Amoaku, chairman of the Scientific Committee of the
Royal College of Ophthalmologists and a specialist in macular
degeneration, says when they come to visit him, patients do two
things: first, they request that nobody else is in the room
before mentioning the hallucinations, then afterwards they
breathe a sigh of relief.

For Mary Orr, 84, from West Kilbride, the final straw was seeing
the walls of her house covered in white fur. In desperation, she
started to claw at them. 'It was then I thought: "I can't live
like this," ' she says.

After months assuming she had dementia, she was referred to a
psychiatrist who recognised the signs of CBS straight away and
told her to see an eye doctor.

It explains why she still sees pink squares and snakes rising
out of the pavement, but Mary is resolute that the worst is
behind her. As she says: 'It's the fear of not knowing what's
happening that you can't live with.'


The Macular Disease Society, www.maculardisease.org, 0845 241
2041; Royal National Institute for the Blind, www.rnib.org.uk,
0303 123 9999.