Current mood:	okay
Current music:	Socker - Kent
Entry tags:	depression, glorious comeback, life

Phantom smells
There are only two ways, in my opinion, that I differ from most people.

The first way, and this really only applies to "most people on the internet", is that I don't think I'm very different from most people.

The second way is that I smell things that aren't there.

I used to hear things that weren't there as well, but I grew out of that in my teens. Now I just have phantom smells.

I know what they are not. They are not synaesthesia - I am not smelling sounds, sights, or tactile sensations. They are also not a symptom of Petit Mal - I show many symptoms of Petit Mal, so for a long time I thought that the smells were part of it, but apparently the phantom smells of both Petit and Grand Mal are either burnt toast or an unidentified smell, and neither of those fit my smells. The most common hit I get when Googling "phantom smells" is for "olfactory hallucinations" and when I follow those links they are all to do with both forms of Mal.

By the way, though I show some symptoms for Petit Mal (and also some, but fewer, for Grand Mal), I am glad to say that I have been diagnosed as not having it.

I just smell things that aren't there. I am about 95% sure that they are related to my mental health, and so I am only prepared to discuss one particular phantom smell in public.

When I am depressed I smell over-ripe or slightly rotten oranges. In the past I have torn (metaphorically) my home apart searching for these oranges and found nothing vaguely resembling a citrus fruit, over-ripe or otherwise, so nowadays I make do with checking the most likely spaces and then moving straight on to combating the depression itself.

I won't go into why I get depressed, and this entry is only being written because I don't smell oranges right now.

I have some theories about why I smell oranges when I'm depressed, and why I smell phantom smells at all. These theories are only semi-scientific, in that I 1) do only sporadic research on the whole phenomenon, 2) don't get keep strict records of my depression, and 3) am very unwilling to experiment on myself. Yes, I can, and do, think of a hundreds of ways of qualifying and quantifying my phantoms (I'm a tester, for fuck's sake, I do this for a living), but right now, I'm just going to tell you my current conclusions.

Conclusions are: I am smelling my own pheromones, and putting my own interpretation on top of what I smell. With much handwaving around the word "pheromones", since I don't know what else to call the smell given off by the chemicals in my brain. Oranges, because of when the smell of oranges became important in my life, which was right about the time that I first became depressed. Why a smell and not a sound? There's a lot of literature about how the sense of smell is the most primeval of senses, and how it is the most likely to trigger memories, but if that explained why I got phantom smells during depression surely there would be more documented cases of others having the same experience, right? Partly, I think that it is because I have a good sense of smell - in fact, the best sense of smell in my family, so when a child I could smell things that the rest of the family couldn't, and therefore dismissed as only in my mind*. Maybe I am just scent-dominant (from a theory by ozarque), and so few other people are that we are just ignored.

Whichever or whatever, this is still a very real phenomenon for me. Only last week I could smell the oranges everywhere, and my other, undiscussed, phantom smells are still around. And I wanted to share, in case people find it interesting, or have ideas of where I can look next time I am motivated enough to research it.

* About it being in my mind - I get really pissed off when people dismiss things as being "only" in the mind. There are huge numbers of things that we take as reality that only exist in our collective understanding, our collective minds agreeing that something is so - this is behind a lot of cultural misunderstanding, for instance, where the Irish collective understanding of what constitutes good manners clashes with the Finnish understanding of good manners (to take a trivial example). But that rant can be left for another time.