Jenna Grace, a BMC patient, lives with sensory processing disorder (SPD), and recently wrote an article for Medium.com describing her day-to-day experience with SPD. SPD is a condition that makes people hyper-sensitive to sensory stimuli, such as touch, sharp sounds, or even pungent smells, and often cause a primative “fight, flee, or freeze” response. It is a relatively unresearched disorder, and has yet to be entered in the DSM, and Jenna is currently writing a full-length book on the topic to raise awareness and understanding. Here’s an excerpt from the Medium article:
For as long as I can remember, receiving sensory information causes me to have a primitive reaction. Touch makes me want to crawl out of my skin so badly, I scratch at it as if trying to get out. The sound of a knock on the door makes me jump from my seat and gasp for air. If the sound continues, I become frightened. Scared for my life. Paranoid. Then, I blackout. A smell, like fish or someone’s perfume, makes me enter into an altered state. Like when Bugs Bunny turns into a monster. My primitive dukes always up, ready for a fight.
Click here to read the article – Life with Sensory Processing Disorder.