Again, until it is gone, you don’t realise how important smell is to intimacy and connection. Even worse was the effect of parosmia.
“His natural odour used to make me want him; now it makes me vomit,” one woman described. How do you tell your lover that?
Some people’s relationships with themselves and the world had also changed. Some with no sense of smell reported feeling detached from themselves and the world.
With parosmia, it could be more disturbing yet, with disgusting smells being triggered by everyday scents, making the world feel like a dangerous and confusing place.
For some these sensory changes were, fortunately, temporary. However, months down the line, many are stuck with profound sensory changes, with all the distress that brings.
While there is evidence that smell training helps sensory recovery in other conditions, we are still at the early stages of understanding and developing treatments for what amounts to a pandemic of altered sensing.
Vincent Deary is Professor of Applied Health Psychology at Northumbria University, Newcastle. Duika Burges Watson is Lecturer in Global Health at Newcastle University. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.
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