Author's Introduction
- It began in late September 2022. I was just recovering from a severe case of COVID-19 when Hurricane Ian hit my hometown in southwest Florida. My wife and I evacuated to Miami for a week and watched the damage unfold on various news channels. When we returned to our home in Fort Myers a week later, we were shocked by the devastation. The scenes were absurd. There were huge fishing boats suspended like toys from mangrove and palm trees, entire homes floating in the middle of San Carlos Bay, the famous causeway to Sanibel Island ripped in half, and the town of Fort Myers Beach utterly flattened. But our house, albeit without power, made it through the storm relatively unscathed.
- One evening amid the power outage, I happened to be outside on the patio reading by headlamp when I began noticing my jaw clenching and tightening up. I was suddenly having difficulty controlling my tongue, lips and jaw. I came inside and asked my wife if I might be having a stroke. Beyond my Covid experience and the wreckage of the hurricane, this was an extremely stressful time in my life. As a philosophy professor, I had just published a new book that was generating a modest buzz, and it seemed as if I was being invited to give talks all over the place. Always an anxious traveller, I was scheduled to fly in rapid succession from Madison, Wisconsin to Birmingham, England and then to Sweden for a talk in Stockholm, then to Linköping for another talk and back to Stockholm again for a third. This, in addition to my normal work duties and some major upheavals in my personal life, appeared to short-circuit me physically and emotionally.
- My first thought was that I had temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ) from excessive jaw clenching. I scheduled appointments with numerous dentists, who confirmed that I was a jaw clencher and created an occlusion splint to wear at night. But the movements continued, and the pain was getting worse. My tongue was moving constantly, and I noticed it affecting my speech with slurring and a pronounced lisp. I started chewing gum to occupy my tongue. The anxiety about what was happening to my body reached such a breaking point that I cancelled all my trips and gave my talks virtually via Zoom. I scheduled an appointment with a psychiatrist, who recommended I up the dose of the antidepressant Zoloft, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), a version of which I had been taking for well over two decades. But things got only worse. The increased dose of Zoloft made me feel dissociated and dangerously impulsive. Ativan was added to help take the edge off, but the spiral of depression and anxiety deepened. I considered checking into a psychiatric hospital. What was happening to me?
Author's Conclusion
- Alas, I’m still searching for adequate treatment and on the lookout for a speech pathologist or neuropsychologist with formal training and expertise in FND. In the meantime, I realise that the only way forward is to learn to accept my condition as it is now, to have compassion for myself and my malfunctioning mouth, and to continue moving toward the things that I am afraid of.
- Part of this path to acceptance was to get out in front of audiences and talk again – slurred speech, flailing tongue and all. A pivotal moment came at an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the fall of 2023, about a year to the day that I began suffering from symptoms. I was terrified of embarrassing myself, but I walked to the podium and, before I began, openly and honestly described my condition to the audience.
- Appropriately titled ‘Wellness, Burnout, and the Conditions of American Work’, the talk went over beautifully, and the support from participants over the next few days was extraordinary. I made lasting friendships, and I’m convinced that my willingness to be vulnerable about my health struggles made an important difference in how both I and my work were received.
- Another important move in the direction of self-acceptance – one that I would certainly not recommend to everyone suffering from FND – was a session of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in Boulder, Colorado. There is a growing body of research showing that psychedelic treatment may be effective in treating depression, PTSD and anxiety, and perhaps even diminish symptoms of FND. My intention for treatment was to dismantle the ego-driven need for perfection and control that was tormenting me, and to let go of the ruminating grief I was holding onto at the loss of my old self.
- Taking a so-called ‘heroic’ dose of psilocybin, the five-hour journey was profound: I was flooded with indescribable feelings of love, tenderness and forgiveness, and an immediate and direct awareness of the interdependence of all things.
- My therapist recorded me at the peak, lying with eye mask and headphones on, sobbing and writhing in ecstasy, saying over and over: ‘The glory… the glory… let me share.’ Whether or not this experience of transcendence endures remains to be seen, but there is finally light coming in through a crack in the door. Eating yoghurt and granola in the aftermath, food once again fell out of my mouth. But my reflexive response of despair and frustration was absent.
- Instead, I found myself smiling – then laughing. I was finally seeing my disorder, and my life, from a much wider lens – and from a cosmic perspective, none of it really mattered. That makes a difference.
Author Narrative
- Kevin Aho is a professor in the Department of Communication and Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University. He is the author of One Beat More: Existentialism and the Gift of Mortality (2022), Existentialism: An Introduction (2020), and the coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Existentialism (2024).
Notes
- This paper - at first sight - seems to be rather self-serving and narcissistic. But the writer has been through a lot, and is doubtless writing both for therapy and to raise awareness.
- There are rather too many acronyms in the paper. The most important one is FND ('functional neurological disorder'), which is his final diagnosis (if that's what it is).
- The author seems to take the view that every illness deserves a cure, even if no-one knows that the problem is, nor how to fix it. I was glad that - in the end - he decided to 'pull himself together' and make the best of it.
- There are 42 Aeon Comments, nearly half of which are replies by the Author. They seem to be supportive (a couple deleted for contravening guidelines may not have been). I suppose I should take them seriously.
- This relates to my Notes on Brain, Mind and Psychopathology.
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "It took months for my functional neurological disorder to finally be diagnosed. It’s a condition that must be recognised"
- For the full text see Aeon: Aho - Permission to be ill.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)