Descartes Error: A Comparative Analysis

Everyone has heard the horror stories of brain injuries and the great damages they cause. There are fundraisers and foundation set up to help the people who struggle from such injuries. However, there are patients who suffer from very similar symptoms that don’t receive the same attention and help. These patients are the ones that suffer from mental illnesses. People don’t see mental illnesses as being as severe as brain injuries. In the book Descartes’ Error, the author Antonio Damasio believes people with brain injuries get more help and attention than patient with mental illnesses because the their damages can be seen from the outside. It is obvious to see something is wrong with them, whereas the mental illnesses patients’ damages only

He states that diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies of their suffers because people believe they cannot help the conditions that affect them. Whereas people who suffer from mental illnesses are seen as an inconveniences. They are blamed for their flaws even though it is not their fault. People see their conditions as a lack of will power rather than a disease. The diseases of the brain are easier to understand for the general public. They know that something terrible happened and it couldn’t be the patient’s fault. They feel sympathetic, so theses people get more help. Society can’t understand what is wrong with people who suffer from mental disease because there is nothing physically wrong with them. They seem normal so they don’t receive as much medical help. Damasio describes this on page

I can see this very clearly in my own life. My younger brother sufferers from an extreme anxiety disorder called Asperger’s. This disorder is on the same spectrum as Autism it is just at the very end of the spectrum making it a less extreme case. It has always been apparent even at a young age that he was different. The only problem is that he doesn’t look any different than the other kids his age. Strangers he meets expect him to act and react just as a normal kid would, but he can’t. My father’s side of the family hard a very hard time understanding my brother’s disorder. They didn’t see it as a disorder. They thought he would just get over it, that he was being weak. It took a lot of convincing and research to prove to them that what was affecting my brother wasn’t a thought process or a weakness, there was something mentally wrong with him. He doesn’t receive help and attention at school as the kids with physical aliments or disorders with physical symptoms like ADHD. It is easy to see that those kids need help, but it wasn’t until we got my brother tested in the second grade that he began to receive help. We had to prove to the schools he was different in order for him to get the attention he needed. On the other hand of the argument, the people with brain injuries or disease get more help because it is obvious there is something wrong with them.