First pour no Drano
[warning – it’s gruesome]
A woman who fantasised about being blind claims to have arranged to have drain cleaner poured in her eyes to live the way she was “supposed to be born”, it has been reported.
Jewel Shuping, from North Carolina, said she was diagnosed with Body Integrity Identity Disorder, a psychological condition where healthy people believe they are meant to be disabled.
I would suggest wearing eye patches rather than pouring Drano into the eyes.
The 30-year-old’s desire to be blind reportedly began in early childhood. At the age of six she would spend hours staring at the sun after being told it could damage her eyes, she told Barcroft Media.
If that were true surely it would have worked. Hours??? Not credible.
BIID, a disorder coined by Dr Michael First, affects a small percentage of the population and is typically associated with the desire to have a specific body part amputated. Suffers often become envious of people who have the disability they crave.
A theory as to the disorder’s cause is that “the brain is not able to provide an accurate plan of the body” causing it to see the offending body part as “foreign and not actually part of the person, thus the desire to have it removed,” according to Biid.org.
Which does nothing to explain wanting to be blind, or thinking you want to be blind.
Snopes checked it out: https://www.snopes.com/news/2015/10/02/jewel-shuping-blind/
Tut, I should have checked Snopes.
Sounds very implausible in light of all that.
Yeah, I was looking for where they state True or Not True; it does sound implausible, but it would be nice to have a firmer acknowledgment.
Well, I mean BIID is a real thing. It is clearly a somatic delusional disorder resulting in psychological suffering, but activists have pressured it to be renamed as body integrity dysphoria. Presumably this is the same source as the change from gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria. Both these changes are bullshit, as they suggest that the suffering is the problem rather than the delusions.
If a person’s view of their body involves distress at having certain body parts, the solution seems to be counsel with the goal that they accept having those body parts, or at least to reduce the distress at having those body parts; the solution is not to amputate. The body is fine, it is the view of the body that is the problem.
***
If a person’s view of their body involves distress at having certain sexed body parts, the solution seems to be to change the body immediately and permanently, even if the person is a minor; anything less that that is literal murder of that person. The view of the body is fine, it is the body that is the problem.
Not going to go search for it, but there were pics of some guy in the hospital after he’d put his hands in liquid nitrogen? so that they would have to be amputated, after his requests to have them amputated were repeatedly turned down. There was a good essay about this a while back:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/