After graduating college, Linda found success working as an extra in Hollywood, achieving the glamorous life she always wanted. But her dreams died when she came down with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a rare disorder characterized by joint dislocations. Linda started taking fentanyl, a painkiller 100 times stronger than morphine. As her painkiller use escalated, she claimed that different sources were causing her pain, including electricity, energy, colors, and even specific people. Despite Linda's wild claims, her mother clings to the belief that Linda's pain is real and she must do everything to help her, including depleting the family's savings and sending her son to be Linda's caretaker.
Missed the episode? Watch it here.
Edited by aetv_dlg, 4 years ago
B4 Facebook. I'm really beginning to wonder. I just get an insane amount of informatio
.... I'm so grateful for the support and informatio
I have heard of that and am opposed to it on principle, since nearly everyone there is famous for illegitimate reasons. (I checked and there are a few exceptions*) and shouldn't be rewarded for that. Plus, it would be psychologically unhealthy for our resident psychologically unhealthy Linda - dwelling on the screwy past and possibly being attacked by callers - and it probably would be a distraction from pursuing important things in life. I hope that technical/logitistical reasons prevent it from happening. And if it does, I would urge fregs to spend a few dollars to make the job unpleasant for Linda and for A&E to lock the thread to stop Linda's self-promoting. There are ways to 'capitalize' on the reputation without blatant fame- and money-seeking behavior.
*I saw AJ Benza is there. I remember him fondly from E! and consider his work to be respectable. Although I wouldn't pay to speak to him. I Googled him (to find out why he has sunk to such lows) and he has a blog post detailing personal observations of Whitney Houston as a secretly out-of-control druggie.
Edited by haroldcarvey, 1 year ago
Well, there's a little humility about Linda's own knowledge level, but it's then followed by tremendous
Edited by haroldcarvey, 1 year ago
To respond to freg's since-deleted comments...
Nobody normal knows and particularly likes Linda. (Not that I'm in that category.) Many people find Linda interesting, but most in a trainwreck kind of way. I don't know why anyone would pay to talk to her. People who have more money than common sense? It is one thing to talk to a possibly crazy person in public, another to pay for the privilege. That could work either way - Linda being more free to say crazy things and people more free to bring up unpleasant things about her. If she hasn't learned that from how people address her online. Anyway, it's sad if Linda has nothing better to do than talk with strangers. Personally, I'd rather have one good friend and be a nobody than be well-known and have no real friends.
Also, looking at the most predictable aspect, the money could only be a little without causing disability benefits to end. If that happened and later income dried up, Linda might not re-qualify since indications are she is mostly able-bodied for the time being. As I like to say, chronic bad judgment on Linda's part, rather than innately bad health, is what trashed a once-promising life.
Edited by haroldcarvey, 1 year ago
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stop-walking-eggshells/201204/why-they-cant-feel-joy-narcissistic-shallow-emotions
Vulnerable narcissists can better access feelings like insecurity and weakness, whereas grandiose NPs better shield themselves with confidence and high self-worth. Vulnerable NPs appear to be overcompensating for low self-esteem and a deep-seated sense of shame that may have emerged during early childhood as a coping mechanism to deal with parental neglect or abuse. (Typically, grandiose NPs were not neglected; instead, they were treated like mommy and daddy's little prince or princess. As adults, they still expect to be treated as special, superior and powerful.)
Vulnerable NPs see themselves as victims of those who don't understand how superior they are, and unlike grandiose NPs, they actually care about how their partners see them. They also have some different behaviors: they:
Tend to swing back and forth between acting superior and feeling hurt
May get self-destructive when partners point out their vulnerabilities
Accuse the other partner of having affairs and may be obsessive about preventing that from happening
Have a pattern of looking for a perfect mate and demanding that she tells him he's important and loved
But the main difference between vulnerable NPs and invulnerable NPs is in the way they feel (or don't feel). Specifically,
With their fragile self-esteem, vulnerable narcissists experience helplessness, anxiety, and depression when people don't treat them as they desire.
They feel shamed and humiliated by negative feedback or when others challenge their superior self-image.
They also experience anxiousness, bitterness, dissatisfaction, and disempowerment.
They suffer from many BPD-like emotions, like feelings of emptiness and inadequacy. Others find them sensitive and emotional; preoccupied with fears of rejection and abandonment. They are touchy, quick to be offended, and easily provoked.
Edited by haroldcarvey, 1 year ago
According to the American research, there has been a 67 per cent increase in [narcissism] over the past two decades [2009 article], mainly among women. [Funny how the American media downplayed the female aspect.]
An estimated ten per cent of the population suffers from narcissism as a full-blown personality disorder.
Narcissists are most likely to end up in leadership roles despite the fact they often don't make good leaders.
I don't actually believe it's 10 percent, but clearly it isn't rare. Narcissism is depicted as vile, but the reality is more sad than evil. Linda has good traits that could serve her very well if she were to lessen the inflated sense of self that has been so vile to her own well-being.
Edited by haroldcarvey, 1 year ago
often times we forget how "normal"we
My fun Dick Clark Story.....
I've been saying that Linda's pro-pain med stance might be leading people to ruin. I recently heard about another person with EDS who was misusing substances in attempt to manage pain. Unlike Linda, she admitted it. However, she might have been using hard drugs and already had some idea of how EDS is supposed to be treated. It shows the risk that is a combination of bad judgment and an almost intractable disorder.
It made me do some research...
Borderline Personality Spectrum Disorders. In the 2002–2004 National Survey on Drug Use and Health among patients with past-year non-medical prescription opioid use, those with abuse/dependence were more likely to suffer from co-morbid symptoms of panic disorder and social phobia/agoraphobia symptoms. Interestingly, it has also been demonstrated that CSF beta endorphin levels are positively associated with anxiety symptoms in normal subjects but not in those with panic disorder further indicating a role for the endogenous opioid system in the modulation of anxiety. And indeed, there are significant neuro-psychiatric similarities between the symptoms of the human opiate withdrawal state and anxiety disorders symptoms in general.
Pain practitioners will have already noticed that the anxious patient can become a desperate patient; and desperate patients have an increased risk of becoming aberrant patients. In pain management we have been ingrained to be on the lookout for the mind numbingly, terrifying individual known as the “aberrant patient.” These patients, by definition, can be anxious, irritable, labile, manipulative, threatening, and even abusive towards the pain practitioner. These patients share many similarities with patients in the opioid withdrawal state who manifest characteristic autonomic and somatic symptoms—including dysphoria, restlessness, hyperirritability, and anxiety. These defining behavioral characteristics are also hallmarks of the borderline personality spectrum of psychiatric disorders which are characterized by a lack of affective regulation of emotional responses. And it is with this spectrum of disorders that some of the most recent neuroimaging findings demonstrate a clear link between endogenous opioid dysfunction and the cognitive and emotional regulation of behavior.
…
Of the many risk factors that must be addressed with patients for proper consent to be achieved is the potential for hazardous drug interactions between the patient’s prescribed opioids and/or other medications and substances of abuse, including alcohol. Patients must be warned about the cumulative sedating effects that can occur when opioids are concomitantly ingested with many different substances—especially the psycho-tropic medications. For instance, even though the benzodiazepines are not, and should not be, contraindicated for use with opioid medications—as the anxiolytic affects of benzodiazepines and the muscle relaxants, in many cases, can reduce the need for higher doses of opioid medications in certain chronic pain patients—it must be stressed that intoxication with these medications, alone or used together, is always a possibility. And, of course, the risks of concurrent heavy alcohol use/abuse or the use of any legal or illegal substance concurrently with prescribed opioid medications always includes the possibility of accidental overdose/death.
Parenthetically, many pain practitioners are already secondarily modulating their patient’s neuro-psychiatric symptoms while treating their pain when they prescribe pain-modulating psychotropic medications such as the anti-depressants (i.e., milnacipran, duloxetine, amitriptyline, nortriptyline etc.) and the anti-convulsants (i.e., pregabalin, gabapentin, valproate, etc.). The careful pain practitioner must always be aware of the risk for suicide with any of the psychotropic medications—but especially in their chronic pain patient population that is already at risk for symptoms of dysphoria and desperation.
http://www.practicalpainmanagement.com/resources/smoking-aberrant-behavior-chronic-pain-patients
http://www.wvrxabuse.org/predicting%20addictive%20behaviors.pdf
Therefore, it makes sense why doctors respond to some (anxious) Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome patients as though they are crazy and not in pain.
Also, from some sites I don’t want to list, I learned that exaggerating pain level, seeking specific pain meds, and (unfortunately since often true for EDS patients) claiming allergy to or ineffectiveness of (less-likely-to-be-abused) NSAID pain meds are red flags to doctors. I wonder if self-referral also is, and I presume that looking young and healthy also raises suspicions.
Since certain red flags are easily hidden – as in patients who put on a good act and have never received mental health treatment – cases like Linda’s can happen even with careful doctors. Family members and others need to pay attention.
Edited by haroldcarvey, 1 year ago
Of course she's upset, but how much good are the usual "I'm so sorry, dear" and "Dump him, girl"?
First of all, the clinical trial in Maryland probably is still open and would cost virtually nothing if she qualifies. Also, she could ask someone who hurt her to make amends by contributing to 'self-pay' for a visit the geneticist she likes. (I think that's generally not more than a few hundred dollars.) Or she could try a different strategy for educating doctors she already sees, as I find many of them can be taught new tricks when approached the right way. She could also ask for the names of local doctors who have treated EDS patients, because experience usually makes them take the condition more seriously.
But the presumed boyfriend and maybe she herself have another problem: the belief that any doctor could make much of a difference. Beyond knowing how to diagnose EDS and order tests for potential life-threatening problems, that usually isn't so. The media likes to focus on conditions that might be highly treatable or even curable, but there's no hope of that for EDS in the near future (and pain meds definitely don't count as a particularly helpful treatment for most with the condition). At the very least, she should communicate that to her guy, even if she's already decided to dump him.
Edited by haroldcarvey, 1 year ago
© 1998-2011, A&E Television Networks, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
