Mind games: coma calamities and delusional deliberationsMind games: coma calamities and delusional deliberations
All In The Mind
Where does the Self go when it is battered and bruised beyond recognition? Traumatized after head injury; altered through autism; deconstructed by delusion? TV columnist Ruth Ritchie and neuropsychologist Dr Paul Broks join Natasha Mitchell to navigate the wilderness from very different perspectives, and opposite sides of the doctor's table.
30:06•25 Aug 2007
Mind Games: Broken Brains, Lost Selves and Life After Coma
Episode Overview
- The idea of the self is presented as a story built from language, memory and experience, which can malfunction when the brain is damaged.
- Cases like Cotard’s syndrome show how someone can lose their basic sense of being alive while still holding a life story in place.
- Families living with coma and severe brain injury face years of uncertainty, with medical staff often unable to predict long‑term outcomes.
- Brain injuries that leave people looking physically ‘fine’ can still cause deep, ongoing difficulties that others around them may not recognise.
- Storytelling – both scientific and personal – offers a way to grasp the messy, ambiguous reality of damaged minds better than neat clinical explanations.
“We build a story of ourselves from the raw materials of language, memory and experience.”
Curious about how others navigate their sobriety journey? Here the focus shifts from substances to the organ that underpins every craving, choice and change: the brain itself. All In The Mind pairs British neuropsychologist Dr Paul Broks with columnist and author Ruth Ritchie for a sharp, funny and at times brutal look at what happens when the sense of self is smashed by injury, coma, delusion or autism.
Broks reads from his book *Into the Silent Land*, sharing clinical stories that feel more like short stories than case notes. He argues that “a person is just a story” and that confabulation is “the inadvertent construction of an erroneous self story”, raising uncomfortable questions about how stable any of our identities really are.
His accounts of patients who think they’re dead, or who feel like a “floating point of subjective awareness”, put words to the fragility many people in recovery quietly fear. Ritchie brings that fragility home with black humour and raw honesty from *Waterlemon: Husband in a Coma and Other Setbacks*.
One moment she thinks her husband just has “a bung eye and a few broken ribs”; the next she’s told that on the Glasgow coma scale “three is the same as you register when you’re dead.” Her stories of intensive care, absurd medical meetings and her husband believing he’s in “The Gaza Strip” show how families cling to hope while living with open-ended uncertainty.
The episode suits anyone curious about how brain injury, autism and psychiatric syndromes can warp – and sometimes rebuild – the self. It doesn’t offer neat answers, but it does offer candid stories, dark humour and a reminder that behind every diagnosis is a person trying to piece together who they are. If the brain can change so dramatically, what might that mean for changing a life caught up in addiction too?
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!
More From This Show
The latest episodes from the same podcast.