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Selective Sound Sensitivity/Misophonia?

22K views 52 replies 27 participants last post by  Lapatik 
#1 ·
Anybody have this? I'm wondering if there's any relationship with this and SAD or Asperger's as there is between SAD and Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). I seem to suffer from all of them.

"People who have misophonia are most commonly annoyed, or even enraged, by the sound of other people eating, breathing, coughing, or other ordinary sounds. Oddly, they are not normally annoyed by sounds that they themselves make. Reactions to these sounds are not limited however to just loud eating noises, people with misophonia find themselves affected by all kinds of noises. Such reactions are also involntary. Often, people who have misophonia are also annoyed by other people's repetitive movements, such as leg-tapping, nail-biting and typing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia

http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/cgi/content/full/70/6/739
 
#39 ·
I can't stand certain noises. These are the ones that can trigger quite an unpleasant stress attack.

* Toddlers screaming/loud crying
* Screeching noises, brakes, nails on a chalkboard
* Whining noises, mechanical noises, anything that sounds like a human distress sound
* Certain bird sounds, especially repetitive squawks.

I use ear plugs, and MP3 stereo players, and still doesn't stop the stress attack. I think this one is psychological - especially the toddler crying/any sound that sounds like human distress.
 
#41 ·
This kind of thing is a source of much suffering for me. Even if I like someone and want to spend time with them I'm deterred by their obnoxious loud breathing and eating, it's been a component in the destruction of a few relationships. Now I mostly sit in my room with iso headphones on. :[
 
#46 ·
Hearing loss in left ear

:| I'd move every 6 months with 2-3 months as hell. I was terrorized because they blamed me for calling the police on 2 members coming home late after a movie. Make a long story short they played allot of head games with me. I never did recover from that. Then my hearing loss got worse in the left ear. So what seems to be people that might be talking about me is actually unidentified sounds my hearing is trying to make out. I already have high anxiety from 10 eye surgeries, see I was a case study for PRK which became lasik. Add that with this incident. yup. I've had people talk crap at me at theatres, show, buses, and etc. I now after about 10 years have lost the tolerance against this stuff and the misophonia diagn last year. A few neighbors now in Rosemead,ca have taken a liking to take smack here too. And so I ambient noise sometimes sound like people talking crap but last week I walked by a couple and the male said by uckr. sorry mod. I use to setup nightclub sound and worked at the planet studio. :p you know. so my training is a curse. currently waiting for hearing eval and cognitive testing at ucla. I know but to cover all basis. I don't like lookin back at stuff that comes behind and bites yah.
I hope this can help someone. I deal with it day by day
 
#49 ·
People with misophonia have a large menu of auditory triggers that includes human sounds, animal sounds, machinery, and repetitive noises, in addition to visual triggers (like legs swinging or hair twirling) and olfactory (smell) triggers.

Radio Health Journal just released a radio podcast on misophonia (Sept. 2013) and you can access the mp3 podcast for free at itunes.

Amazon sells the book Sound-Rage. A Primer of the Neurobiology and Psychology of a little Known Anger Disorder and the book discusses in length all about triggers.

I hope this helps.
 
#50 ·
Nail tapping, barking dogs and crying are sounds that really make me want to cry or just explode inside. so yes-very real symptoms for me;but if I don't see a therapist people would just assume I'm being 'fake'...which I am not :/ I'll need to write a concise list of my problems. It's a little depressing...I know that a hypochondriac is waaay over the edge; but that's not me. Yeah-I do have overlapping symptoms such as this; but I'm not making it up either. I remember being 12, listening to a child cry and I turned to my mother and said bluntly, "I wish that child would shut up-seriously-it's annoying me." Needless to say she proceeded to give me a shocked look.
 
#51 ·
The largest study done to date on misophonia that also looked at the mental history of misophonia sufferers:
The symptom pattern of misophonia shares a number of features with other DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10 diagnoses: specific phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social phobia, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), intermittent explosive disorder, emotionally unstable personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, OCPD, and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It also shares similarities with sensory processing disorders (SPD) and phonophobia. Even though misophonia resembles these disorders, none of the diagnostic categories fit the whole symptom pattern of misophonia...

Having said that, the authors did note, however, that 52.4% of people with misophonia even met criteria for OCPD (Obsessive compulsive personality disorder). Another interesting comment that definitely applies to myself:
Five patients (11.9%) reported a misophonia-like reaction when confronted with certain repetitive visual movements made by another person such as leg rocking (in analogy to misophonia this can be named misokinesia, meaning hatred of movement).

Misophonia: Diagnostic Criteria for a New Psychiatric Disorder
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetc....1371/journal.pone.0054706&representation=PDF


 
#52 ·
I thought this was a very interesting insight by these authors suggesting that misophonia might be a type of synesthesia:
To date, no research has examined the neurological origin of misophonia, and preliminary investigations suggest it is not due to any primary neurological or psychological disorder or trauma. Nevertheless, misophonia displays similarities to a genetic condition known as synesthesia. In synesthesia, as in misophonia, particular sensory stimuli evoke particular and consistent, additional sensations and associations. Well-known forms of synesthesia include letters evoking a par- ticular color, or sounds/music evoking colorsbut there are in fact many different subtypes of synesthesia, with a variety of "inducers" (e.g., music, taste, words, sequences) evoking certain "concurrents" (e.g., color, shapes, taste). While most synesthe- sia research has examined the perceptual sensations related to synesthesia, the condition seems to have an affective component as well.
First, synesthetic congruency (e.g., when a grapheme- color synesthete sees a letter in the "correct" color) is related to positive affect. Furthermore, both inducers and concurrents can be of emotional rather than perceptual nature. Interestingly, the latter indicates that for certain subtypes of synesthesia, similar to misophonia, inducers evoke a particular feeling or emotion rather than a pure perceptual sensation. This has been studied in tactile-emotion synesthesia (e.g., feeling sandpaper evokes a feeling of jealousy; Synesthetic associations, like misophonic experiences, are automatic (in the sense that they do not take effort or conscious deliberation), are consistent within an individual and persist throughout life, and seem to run in families. Given these similarities, neu- roimaging findings in synesthetes may provide us with hypotheses on the neural basis of misophonia. First, associated sensations in synesthesia are found to be associated with co-activation in relevant (associated) brain areas. Furthermore, previous studies support a direct linking of relevant sensory regions in synesthesia mediated by an actual increase of anatomical connectivity. Similarly, altered connections from a lesioned thalamus to the cerebral cortex led to a type of acquired synesthesia in which auditory stimuli produced tactile percepts. Differing in the level of speci- ficity and complexity of evoked responses observed in synesthetes, individuals with misophonia display basic and non-elaborated responses to triggering stimuli, varying largely in the intensity of the response. Nevertheless, the underlying neurological cause of this condition may be similar to that of synesthesia in terms of enhanced connectivity between relevant brain regions. In short, a pathological distortion of connections between the auditory cor- tex and limbic structures could cause a form of sound-emotion synesthesia.
Misophonia: physiological investigations and case descriptions
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00296/abstract#sthash.NSMrtrne.dpuf
 
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