PHILADELPHIA — Bridget Sharkey set down the letter on the couch. The words, written in the near-perfect handwriting of a 14-year-old who is serious about her studies, seemed alien coming from this soft-spoken girl.
“I sat there with my insides burning, hearing the sounds that bothered me the most: chewing and swallowing,” she wrote. “More and more sounds bothered me, and this time it gave me a new reaction. It made me angry.”
For Bridget, dinner with her family in their Schwenksville home was becoming a nightmare.
Her father, Michael, describes her as the “ideal, passive baby,” he said. “She never cried. We never had an issue with her.”
But two years ago, Bridget started morphing into a girl who was almost unrecognizable to her parents. A girl who said she wanted to hurt her younger sisters at dinner, a girl who had to quit the softball team she loved so much, a girl whose hopes of getting into the National Honor Society were slipping away as her grades plummeted.
Bridget learned through an Internet search that her condition had only recently been given a name. She called it the “m-word,” but researchers in the field know it as misophonia, literally translated as “hatred of sounds.”
Jennifer Jo Brout, who also has misophonia, directs the Sensation and Emotion Network and Misophonia International Research Network, both dedicated to understanding auditory overresponsivity. She said the disorder begins with a negative response to repetitive stimuli, called triggers. Usually the sounds are familiar at the dinner table, such as chewing or lip-smacking, but repetitive visual cues can be triggers as well.
Zach Rosenthal, associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical Center, said the label for this condition is not ideal.
“It’s suggestive of a hatred of sounds, and I think that hate is the wrong word,” he said. Rather, he suspects the condition is a result of survival circuitry gone haywire.
The limited body of research on misophonia demonstrates that when people with it hear repetitive sounds, they enter into fight-or-flight mode — a heightened state of arousal in response to perceived harm.
But for sufferers, the experience is more living nightmare than “fight or flight.”
Here’s how Bridget described the experience: “It makes me immediately stop what I am doing. It makes me want to scream and yell, or physically make the person stop the trigger.”
Jeff Gould, 55, a videographer from Long Branch, N.J., who has had misophonia for 48 years, described the feeling when he hears a trigger as “physical pain,” although he said anticipating the sound is an even bigger ordeal.
“It’s like a plane crash,” he said. “Going down is worse than the actual moment.”
And Kathy Reynolds, 58, a New Jersey resident who works in a clinical lab, describes it just as vividly: “Most people don’t like nails on a chalkboard. It sends a shiver up your spine. Imagine that amplified a hundredfold. Imagine that happening for 10 to 15 minutes, and you’re trapped.”
Previously, misophonia was lumped into a more general category of sensory processing disorder, Brout said, although neither condition is recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the early 2000s, Pawel and Margaret Jastreboff of the Emory University School of Medicine, working with patients with hyperacusis, a disorder in the perceived volume of sounds, noticed there was a subset of patients with different symptoms. Those patients were reacting to repetitive triggers, not when sounds were merely too loud.
Misophonia could be a matter of the brain’s failing to filter out unnecessary stimulation, Brout said.
When a sleeping dog hears a noise, it will prick up its ears in alert. But if the noise keeps repeating, there’s less sense of danger and the dog will stop pricking up its ears.
“It’s the same with people,” Brout said. “The auditory stimuli travels the quickest to the fight-or-flight center.”
Most people can filter sounds out, Gould said. “But when you have misophonia, you do the opposite. You zoom in on those sounds and filter everything else out.”
This theory about the underlying basis of misophonia is not embraced by all, however; researchers are not sure what the underlying basis is.
Misophonia likely has both a genetic and environmental component, Brout said.
