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Incredibly bizarre psych condition

Deepdale

Deepdale

macrumors 68000
Original poster
May 4, 2005
1,965
0
New York
Did anyone watch yesterday's "Primetime" that opened with a segment by correspondent Jay Schaedler that dealt with a psychological disorder with the acronym BIID -- Body Integrity Identity Disorder? Those affected struggle with intense desires to have one or more of their limbs amputated, and then voluntarily engage in self-destructive practices designed to cause enough physical damage so that their wish becomes reality.

Case in point: Placing one's feet into a bucket or pail deep enough to reach up to the knees and then filling it with dry ice, remaining there for hours as temperatures plunge to 50 or 75 degrees below zero. After doing that, one man then drove himself to the hospital. Doctors were unable to do anything and had to remove both legs. When Jay's story ended, I shook my head in disbelief.

http://www.overground.be/article.php?code=66&lan=en
 
That's so sad. I can't imagine what it must be like to feel that way. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to attempt to seek help for such a condition. This article made me a little more thankful for my health, both physical and mental.
 
I saw the show. I guess the most frustrating part was that one of the patients -- the guy who actually succeeded in getting his legs amputated -- has finally, through a combination of Prozac and therapy, come to understand that it was a crazy thing to do.

I have to admit that I got cracked up at the segment about people with "Foreign Accent Syndrome" because it reminded of the song "She Thinks She's Edith Head":
Back in high school, I knew a girl
Not too simple and not too kind
We both grew up but I heard she changed
From a New Wave fan to another kind

She thinks she's Edith Head
But you might know she's not
The accent in her speech
She didn't have growing up
She thinks she's Edith Head
Or Helen Gurley Brown
Or some other cultural figure
We don't know a lot about
Click to expand...
 
I think I have the opposite disorder where I want additional appendages attached to my body so I could get more things done....
 
Lyle said:
I guess the most frustrating part was that one of the patients -- the guy who actually succeeded in getting his legs amputated -- has finally, through a combination of Prozac and therapy, come to understand that it was a crazy thing to do.
Click to expand...

That was interesting to hear him acknowledge that. It is so hard to imagine how stunned the husband of that woman in France must have been when she told him she wanted her legs removed.
 
From what I understand, it's actually similar to some gender disorders. In the way that some men feel they should be women (and vice-versa), there are some people who feel that they should not have all their limbs (either because they think the appendages should have never been there, or because they feel they should be an amputee). It's highly related the the idea of "nullification" which can often involve male genetalia.
 
This was a recent ER episode I believe.

Guy calls 911 to say he had an accident and his arm has been cut off (or something like that)

he's really weird in his demeanor the whole time they deal with him and eventually its found out that

"If you put it back on me, I'll cut it right back off"

he has an amputation fetish, he cut of his own arm, or did somethinig so that it would come off.
 
We had one of those 'devotee' freaks at work for a while - good riddance when we finally fired him. He was only attracted too/would only date amputees. Kept updating his personal fetish website from work, and spent all day doing no work but surfing/posting to these amputee sites and some religious discussion message board (shipoffools). For weeks before we fired him, I had to remotely monitor his desktop and any non-work website he visited I immediately blocked in DNS :D When he STILL didn't get ANY work done (and the client for his project was freaking the F out over errors & deadlines), he was finally booted.

Lesson: keep your dumbass fetishes out of the workplace, and **** & GBTW.
 
Amputees...by CHOICE??

This is unbelievable:

April 5, 2006 — Karl is a double amputee, but not by accident, birth or disease. He is an amputee by choice.

Six years ago, Karl (who asked that his real name not be used) sat alone in a parked car with 100 pounds of dry ice and an obsession to destroy his legs.

"The first thing I did was I used a wooden flour scoop to scoop some granulated dry ice into the bucket. … It filled the wastebasket with carbon dioxide gas, which was 79 degrees below zero," he said.

Over the next 45 minutes, Karl put his legs in the wastebasket and then kept adding dry ice until it got to the top. "I spent the next six hours well-packed in the dry ice, and then I'd add more dry ice to keep it topped off," he said. A chemistry major in college, Karl had done his research well.

"I'd done all the thermodynamic calculations, the mass of tissue, how much heat you had to subtract from that tissue to achieve freezing temperatures," he said. "And I knew that after six hours I had certainly achieved more than enough to freeze the full thickness."

After those six hours, Karl calmly drove himself to an emergency room, using the automatic hand controls he had installed in the car.

Within days, his legs began to blacken as the frozen tissue died away, and within a month surgeons had no choice but to amputate both of Karl's legs.

Karl is not a one-of-a-kind medical mystery, however. There are others like him, who believe their bodies don't match the picture of themselves they have in their minds.

"I wasn't born in the correct body," said Lilly, who has twice tried to amputate her legs. "The mind doesn't connect up to the body at all."

Obsession Beginning in Childhood

Dr. Michael First, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, is one of the few researchers to study patients with this strange obsession to lose one or more of their limbs. The rare condition is called body integrity identity disorder, or BIID.

"When these people see an amputee, they see … a person of strength being able to overcome hardship, someone to be admired," First said.

Aside from this obsession, First said his BIID patients can appear to be mentally healthy.

"The most striking thing about these people, is that if you were to meet one, you wouldn't have a clue that there was anything unusual about them," he said....
Click to expand...
There's much more here, including the story of one guy who wants to be an amputee so badly that he went to the trouble of finding a surgeon in the Phillipines who would do the operation...for $10,000 a leg.

Man, you think you've seen the weirdest things possible, and then something new comes along. :eek:
 
I've heard of this 'condition' before, castration is another biggie apparently. :eek:
 
This is only an extreme form of cosmetic surgery. What's the difference between this and, for example, breast enhancement/reduction? It's just about where you draw the line.
 
iGav said:
I've heard of this 'condition' before, castration is another biggie apparently. :eek:
Click to expand...

This should be worth a honorable mentioning at Darwin Awards :D

I for one think that everyone should be allowed to get castrated, as long as he doesn't reproduce afterwards to spread his stupidity :D :eek:
 
There was a thing about this in the uk sometime ago although i believe that it was referred to then as body dysmorphic disorder. In the program some patients were able to convince a surgeon to remove a leg/arm, the arguement beign that if it was done properly it might be done by a more unsafe method - for example one person talked of putting a leg under a train. Sounds like a psych disorder to me but then the medical world treated homosexuality the same way until relatively recently!

Parallels can be drawn with people like michael jackson who repeatedly have plastic surgery and are never happy with the results.
 
Yea I saw something about this on dateline this week. I think it was dateline or something similar. It was pretty sick. Thinking of using dry ice to freeze off an appendage doesn't sound pleasant.

Nuc
 
Madness. I'm pretty careful with my body. I don't like things to go and never come back, like if I somehow lost a tooth or a bit of a finger.

I know there is some kind of Symmetrical disorder too. At least Casualty told me so. Where if somebody has broken an arm and it has to be put into a cast and sling, they will try and break the other arm so they're balanced.
God help them if they lose an eye or lung! Or a testicle :eek:
 
calculus said:
This is only an extreme form of cosmetic surgery. What's the difference between this and, for example, breast enhancement/reduction? It's just about where you draw the line.
Click to expand...


To a degree yes, but i guess the general public draws the line before its ok for you to get rid of your limbs
 
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