"dangerous nothingness"

March 27, 2018 12:59 PM

The Edge of Identity by Rachel Aviv for the New Yorker is a long article about Hannah Upp, a woman who disappeared in New York City in 2008 and was found twenty days later, having wandered the city in a fugue state. Aviv tells the story of Upp's life, before and since, and explores the science and history of dissociative amnesia.
posted by Kattullus (15 comments total)

The New Yorker is such a wild magazine because sometimes months will go by where it's just obsessive breakdowns of uninteresting people or dry marches through exhaustive policy debates and then a few times a year they'll publish a story that you'll think about periodically for the rest of your life.

Thanks for posting this. What an absolute nightmare.
posted by saladin at 1:43 PM on March 27, 2018 [13 favorites]

I found this very moving, and liked that Hannah and her mother were prepared to embrace the mystery and absence of explanation, that shows some remarkable courage in the face of a pretty terrifying unknown. I find the idea that my sense of self is so ephemeral that I could abandon it at any moment to wander off and become a freegan deeply unsettling. I don't know how I would put my life back together after an experience like that.
posted by selenized at 2:00 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

I read this yesterday and my first thought was that this woman really needed ongoing mental healthcare. She and her family both seemed a bit deluded about the seriousness of her mental illness.
posted by shoesietart at 2:02 PM on March 27, 2018 [14 favorites]

I guess this is kind of a spoiler, but my whole point is about spoilers, so... Skip this if you haven't read the article yet, I guess.

There's always the moment in a missing-person longform, about 1/3 of the way through, where you realize that they haven't quoted the missing person yet. OK, she died. At that point, the only question becomes "how?". Or, alternatively, they quote the missing person in the third paragraph. Phew, she survives, it's an adventure story. Just once, I'd like to see a missing-person write-around. The article quotes friends and family members talking about the missing person in the past tense, only, boom, at the end to show that the person did make it! Like Martin Guerre, but without Pansette.
posted by kevinbelt at 3:07 PM on March 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

Yes, shoesietart: the "she's so selfless" from the various religious communities she was attached to might have elicited a different response in the wider world. The drawn to water while in fugue seemed bizarrely like the behaviour of some parasites in insects: when it's time for the parasite to break out, they have the host throw themselves in water ... but maybe I'm reading too much into it.
posted by scruss at 4:22 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

The really disturbing thing that they only hint at- they mention a few times in the article that this sort of fugue state comes often (almost always) from some sort of trauma, sexual or otherwise. They sorta dodge around the fact that I think two of the times she only entered this state after a visit to her estranged father- which doesn't necessarily imply sexual abuse, but maybe just a bad time with a difficult man kicked off the problem. There is a sort of implication that this sort of thing happens for a reason- A very bad one, and both Hannah and her mother seem uninterested in teasing that out. Or rather as shoesietart mentions- This is a tragic situation that might have been avoided if proper mental heath care was had.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 4:25 PM on March 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Wow. That's fascinating and disturbing. A very good read. I felt caught up in the quest to find Hannah, and also intrigued by the question of what modern psychology ignores because it can't explain. Who knew identity was so slippery?
posted by tuesdayschild at 4:26 PM on March 27, 2018

obsessive breakdowns of uninteresting people or dry marches through exhaustive policy debates

I don't know how old you are, but did you ever look at an issue from the 70's? they don't really do dry like that any more....
posted by thelonius at 4:48 PM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

I got pretty impatient with her mom treating her daughter's dangerous mental illness as a spiritual experience. No. It was a tragedy that led to her daughter's death. I mean yes, we can meditate on the fragility of the self, but in the end a young woman is dead. Spiritual pontificating didn't help her.
posted by emjaybee at 5:42 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Hannah’s friends were struck by the similarities between her two disappearances. In both instances, she had disappeared at the beginning of the school year, after travelling with her father. David Upp had pondered whether the vacations had been a trigger for her, but he wasn’t satisfied with that explanation.

I was satisfied with that explanation, because the father sounded like a virulently judgemental homophobe who would make a deeply uncomfortable traveling companion.
posted by nicebookrack at 6:16 PM on March 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

A lot of us (maybe all of us) have experienced regular fugue-like states. As a kid, I could never remember things that had happened when I had been woken up at night. I would vociferously deny any such thing had happened. Watching my son, I saw the same behaviour - it wasn't just that he couldn't remember it; he wasn't really there. He would do things on autopilot (hold this, walk that way) but it was all reactive. If he felt the need to urinate he might do so in any circular receptacle - or once on a white bathroom scale. There was clearly some level of recognition and association going on, but no real cognition.

Even as an adult, I know that when driving regular routes I tend to enter a fugue-like state. This can be a problem if I was planning on taking a detour. On such occasions I wouldn't be able to tell you anything about the drive – it's as if it had been driven by someone else.

Benjamin Libet's experiments on the timing of conscious action imply that this sort of unconscious action isn't unusual. We act, and our action is subsequently incorporated into our internal story. But if we don't incorporate the action for some reason, it's not accessible to our "self". It was fugue-like, which is to say that we didn't take the action. But then who did? This article implies that another "self" must have been responsible, but that begs the question.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:33 PM on March 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

The father sounds like a real grade A asshole. May he get his when it's time.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:57 PM on March 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Wow. I may need to re-read this one.

I had the same realization as kevinbelt, but the thing is, we don't actually know if she's alive or dead. It seems plausible she could be alive.

I had a hard time with everyone's insistence that her case was unique and couldn't be defined by diagnosis. That always seems like a red flag for someone who is not going to get the professional help they need. It especially pinged my "uh-oh" radar given all the stuff about her father and the timing of her first two fugues.

But on the other hand, it's hard to know if she could have been helped by psychiatry. It seems like this condition or its treatment is not well-understood.
posted by lunasol at 10:17 PM on March 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

It wasn’t a very ‘clear’ portrayal of her as a person, I didn’t think: unfailingly selfless comes to mind but there is more to people than any one quality. Which has to be a bit of a strategy on the part of the writer, you can’t cover everything so what do you cover? It did not occur to me to think the father (however much a dogmatic ass he might be) was abusing her - though I could see the cultural dislocation of traveling with him and then coming back could be extreme (when I think back on my own experiences) enough that I could sympathize with her on that point.
Lastly, I remember the story in 2008 and it’s sad to read that it likely ended here.
posted by From Bklyn at 12:16 AM on March 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just read this today, and don't understand what I see as the parents' fatalism. Two instances of fugue state, one in which the young woman had to be pulled nearly dead from a river, and the mother insists that mystery is paramount? Her father thinks she's alive, but maybe not? Do the parents not know that women's bodies are used? I wonder what the story would be if Hannah's brother and/or friends had set the tone for the article.
posted by goofyfoot at 10:40 PM on April 1, 2018