Alice In Wonderland Syndrome

When first hearing the name of this syndrome one instantly thinks of the Lewis Carroll classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  Much like what Alice experiences in the book, so does the person afflicted with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS): hallucination-like distortion of physical and/or visual size.

Said physical distortions are most commonly a feeling of altered body image. The afflicted can perceive themselves as having extremities which seem larger or smaller than normal.

These visual distortions are referred to as either micropsia or macropsia.  Micropsia is “a condition affecting human visual perception in which objects are perceived to be smaller than they actually are” (“Micropsia”), whereas macropsia is “a neurological condition affecting human visual perception, in which objects within an affected section of the visual field appear larger than normal, causing the person to feel smaller than they actually are” (“Macropsia”).

Here you will read how Helene Stapinski describes her past experience with AIWS, in addition to how her daughter, Paulina, currently experiences it:

“A few months ago, my 10-year-old daughter, Paulina, was suffering from a bad headache right before bedtime. She went to lie down and I sat beside her, stroking her head. After a few minutes, she looked up at me and said, “Everything in the room looks really small.” And I suddenly remembered: When I was young, I too would “see things far away,” … as if everything in the room were at the wrong end of a telescope. The episodes could last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, but they eventually faded as I grew older.”

In addition to Paulina’s micropsia, another signifier of her syndrome would be the headaches. Even though specialists aren’t 100 percent certain at to how or why this happens, almost every person documented as having AIWS suffered from extreme headaches or migraines as a child. Fortunately, this syndrome is one that usually only lasts from childhood to the early teenage years.

With that being said, there is currently no known treatment for AIWS. If you’d like to learn more about this syndrome, aiws.info is a very simple, yet informative, site that can help.

**Don’t be afraid to leave comments and tell me what you liked or didn’t like. This is my first article for Psych2Go.net and would love to hear any type of feedback that would help me grow as a psych writer.

Works Cited…

“Micropsia.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Jan. 2015. Web. 18 June 2015.

“Macropsia.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Oct. 2014. Web. 18 June 2015.

Stapinski, Helene. “I Had Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times, 23 June 2014. Web. 18 June 2015.