BizarrE's Profile at Vampire Rave.

To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind.
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Quirky Mental Disorders You Haven’t Heard About ?

Walking Corpse Syndrome....

No, this isn’t a disorder for those of us who have woken up feeling “dead tired.” Rather, Cotard’s Syndrome or Walking Corpse Syndrome as it's colloquially known, is a belief held by a person that she is actually dead, or simply doesn’t exist. It has been linked to depression as well as to those who are chronically deprived of sleep or suffer drug psychosis, but is still largely misunderstood by science.

The disorder has also been connected to Capgras Syndrome, a condition where a person thinks someone in her life has been replaced by an imposter or a duplicate. There is a division in the brain between the visual face recognition area and the part that associates emotional responses with that recognition, according to Psychology Today. Thus, a person suffering from either disorder may not even recognize herself and genuinely convinces herself that she doesn’t exist.

Alice In Wonderland Syndrome

Micropsia, nicknamed Alice In Wonderland Syndrome, is a visual neurological disease where a patient sees an object much, much smaller than it really is in real life, as if they were looking at the world “through the wrong end of a telescope” according to the Medical Journal of Psychiatry. The object perceived seems far away or in some cases extremely close at the same time, for example, a car may seem the size of a cat. The illness is not caused by any deficiency of the eye, but rather how the brain interprets the information received from the eyes. Migraines are said to be an important cause and feature of this disorder, which can also affect a person’s other senses such as hearing and touch. This illness is known to affect children aged between five and 10 and has also been linked to schizophrenia, psychoactive drugs and brain tumors.

Self-Cannibalism

While Hannibal Lecter enjoyed eating other people’s flesh, Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome is a disorder in which a person exhibits self-mutilating behavior or less commonly the consumption of his own body parts in a rare condition called autosarcophagy. Lesch-Nyhan affects the joints, muscles and brain of the sufferer as a result of the overproduction of uric acid in the body, leading to compulsive lip and finger biting in the majority of cases. Consequently, in 60 percent of cases, patients have to have their teeth removed to prevent them from biting off their lips, cheeks and tongues. The condition, occurring almost exclusively in boys, has been related to impulse control disorders in general and can range from mild to life threatening.

Erotomania

Sure, we’ve all gone through that narcissistic phase, thinking a person is madly in love us when it just isn’t so, but sufferers of Erotomania take infatuation to the next level. Those who suffer from this mental disorder hold a delusional belief that a person generally from a high social status, like a celebrity, is madly in love with them and making advances toward them through special glances, signals, telepathy or messages through the media. The patient then returns the alleged affection by letters or attempting to visit the unsuspecting recipient. The scary part of this disorder is that the patient’s feeling is so overwhelming that even when the perceived lover directly denies any sentiment of affection or the advances are clearly unwanted, the person remains unconvinced. Thus, the delusion is difficult to break. The condition is often confused with “obsessive love," unrequited love or hypersexuality, but according to Princeton University these conditions do not constitute erotomania by definition.

Lycanthropy....

Ever identify as a sloth or dog on those lazy summer days where all you want to do is sleep in? Sufferers of the psychopathological phenomenon Lycanthropy actually believe they are a literal animal or at least being transformed into one. The condition is often classified as a self-identity disorder subdivided into various types. Boanthropy is the mental condition in which a person believes himself to be a cow or an ox and may very well be seen down on all fours chewing grass. Scientists believe the disorder can originate in a dream before enveloping the entire awakened mind of the individual.

Alien Hand Syndrome

No, this isn’t something out of a science fiction movie but certainly could be for those living this everyday real-life nightmare. Alien hand syndrome occurs when a person’s arm appears to move involuntarily or grab hold of things without the cognitive control of the person to whom the arm belongs. It is caused by a conflict between the left and right parts of the brain or mixing of damaged brain wires. Such a condition can often be traumatic for the sufferer who is terrified that her rogue arm might start exhibiting inappropriate behavior in public, like groping others or manipulating objects or tools giving a “feeling that one limb is foreign” or has a will of its own, according to the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. “I would make a telephone call and this hand would hang up the phone…I would light a cigarette and this one would put it out. I would be drinking coffee and this hand would dump it,” patient Karen Byrne described.

Aboulomania

“She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not,” could certainly be the mantra of those who suffer from this generally unknown mental disorder characterized by crippling indecision, or as psychiatrists term it, “paralysis of the will.” Sufferers of aboulomania appear generally physically and mentally normal in all aspects of life. Yet, when faced with simple life choices like going for a walk or choosing a box of cereal, they run into major psychological problems to the point that they experience anxiety and difficulty regaining normal function. Many sufferers say their incapacity or chronic indecision originates from the need for 100% certainty—hence the sufferer can become paralyzed in the inability to fulfill his own free will when confronted with more than one choice, according to LSR Psychology. The condition has also been associated with depressive and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Foreign Accent Syndrome

Imagine being born British only to one day wake up with a Chinese accent. That is exactly what happened to Sarah Colwill, a British woman hospitalized for an intense migraine who after surgery awoke with a Chinese accent, which changed her whole life having to deal with other people’s bewildered reactions and come to terms with her new voice. Foreign Accent Syndrome, as it is called, is a very rare disorder characterized by the sudden and unexpected appearance of a seemingly “foreign” accent, which often occurs after some kind of brain injury like a stroke or head injury. The sufferer will begin speaking her native language in a foreign tongue. There have been 50 recorded cases of this syndrome, which apparently has no clear cause or cure, since the 1940s. The condition can last a few hours or become permanent. Linda Walker, 50, recalls waking from a stroke to find that her English Geordie accent had been transformed into a Jamaican one: "I've lost my identity, because I never talked like this before. I'm a very different person and it's strange and I don't like it,” she told the BBC.

Pica

Pica is a disorder in which people have a compulsion to eat things that have no nutritional value, or non-food substances such as wood or paint, that continues for more than one month. The disorder is characterized into subtypes including Coprophagy, consumption of feces; Geophagy, the consumption of soil, clay or dirt; Hyalophagia, the consumption of glass; Tricophagia, consumption of hair or wool; or Urophagia, consumption of urine. Pica can be particularly dangerous because it can cause lead poisoning, gastrointestinal blockages or stomach lining tears when a person ingests harmful substances or sharp metal objects. It has been linked to iron or mineral deficiencies or chemical imbalance, but experts haven’t conclusively determined its cause or a cure. It is often seen in pregnant women, small children and those with learning difficulties like autism. Between 4 and 6 percent of institutionalized populations are thought to suffer from Pica, according to The Handbook of Clinical Child Psychology,

Horrific 'Cures' for Mental Illness ......

Trepanation....

Trepanation is boring a hole in your skull. As far back as the Neolithic era, some 7000 years ago, and as recently as today for a small number of strange and misguided folks, the practice of trepanation has been used to “cure” mental illness. Thousands of years ago, having no knowledge of things like brain chemistry, ancient doctors (a loose definition, for lack of a better term) believed that the mentally ill were possessed by demons hanging around in our heads. What better way to rid us of the demons than by giving them a way out? And so, holes were drilled into the skulls of the patients so that the spirits could escape. Did I mention there were no anesthetics back then? Archaeologists have found a plethora of ancient skulls with carefully cut holes in them

Hydrotherapy.....

No, we are not talking about a relaxing swim to calm the nerves. In the early 20th century, psychiatrists used a variety of water treatments to treat patients with mental disorders. Some were harmless enough, like warm baths or an invigorating shower. Some treatments, however, bordered on Cheney-esque waterboarding. One treatment had patients wrapped like mummies in towels soaked in ice water. Another “cure” took the relaxing bath to scary extremes, strapping and restraining patients in the tub for sometimes days at a time, allowing escape only for bathroom breaks. High-pressure water jets were also used, and in at least one instance a patient was bound in a crucifix position and a fire hose was turned on him. One hopes it turned out better than traditional crucifixions

Chemically induced seizures......

Here’s one that actually worked! Sort of. A pathologist named Ladislas von Meduna observed that, following seizures, epileptics appeared calm and even happy. From this he deduced that by inducing seizures in schizophrenics he could calm their symptoms and even perhaps cure them. After experimenting with drugs like strychnine and absinthe, he settled on a drug called metrazol, which stimulated the circulatory and respiratory systems and caused seizures. It seemed to work. The majority of Meduna’s patients seemed to improve, at least according to Meduna. It is possible that the seizures released chemicals that were absent from the schizophrenic brain, triggering improvements. Then again, the side effects like memory loss and fractured bones were not exactly minor, and the treatment was eventually abandoned

Hysteria therapy......

The ancient Greeks may have established Western culture, but they had an odd way of treating mental illness. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine (doctors today still recite the Hippocratic Oath) popularized the term “hysteria” to describe any sort of mental illness suffered by women. Hysteria was diagnosed for anything from nervousness to fainting to simply not talking enough. The cause, according to Hippocrates, was a “wandering womb.” The philosopher Plato claimed that when the uterus, "remains unfruitful long beyond its proper time, it gets discontented and angry and wanders in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives women to extremity."

In order to calm down the wayward uterus, patients were required to inhale foul-smelling substances that would drive away the uterus from wherever it was kicking up a storm in the body. Of course, the real cure for female mental illness was to get the uterus settled in doing what it was there for. Women needed to get married and start having babies.

Mesmerism.......

Franz Mesmer was an Austrian physician back in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Perhaps best known as the father of hypnotism, Mesmer also had an interesting theory about mental illness: blame it on the moon. Mesmer was convinced that the moon’s gravitational pull, much as it affected the Earth’s tides, also affected the body’s fluids. Intermittent episodes of depression and schizophrenia rose and fell like the oceans tides, as the bodily fluids were being acted on by the moon’s gravity. The solution was to counteract the gravity with another force: magnets. By placing magnets on various parts of the body, Mesmer felt the bodily fluids were redistributed and mental equilibrium was restored. Although many of Mesmer’s patients claimed the therapy cured them, medical authorities dismissed mesmerism as ineffective, and positive outcomes were chalked up to the placebo effect.

Rotational therapy.......

Charles Darwin has his unshakable place in intellectual history. Darwin’s grandfather too has a place, although he was perhaps not the giant of science Charles was. Erasmus Darwin was a physician, a scientist and a philosopher. By many accounts he was bad at all of them. His claim to fame was rotational therapy. He believed that disease could be cured by sleep. And he believed that spinning the patient around very fast induced sleep. Needless to say, Erasmus’ therapy was dismissed, but not before Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of America’s Founding Fathers and signatory to the Declaration of Independence, adopted his rotational therapy for the purposes of curing mental illness. Rush believed that mental illness was caused by brain congestion, and that spinning would reduce the congestion and cure the mental disorder. We can safely assume that dizziness was the main result of his therapy, not cure.

Insulin-coma therapy.........

Viennese doctor Manfred Sakel developed insulin-coma therapy in 1927. Apparently not a particularly careful doctor, he accidently gave one of his patients an insulin overdose, resulting in her falling into a coma. The patient, who was a morphine addict, awoke from her coma and discovered that her addiction had disappeared. Sakel, being the bad doctor he was, made the same mistake with another patient who also awoke addiction-free. Sensing a trend, Sakel began intentionally inducing insulin comas to schizophrenics and other patients, and 90% of them reportedly were cured. It is unknown why or even if these claims were true, but thankfully the insulin-coma therapy eventually faded away by the 1960s. A good thing, since it was a dangerous therapy and 2% of the patients weren’t cured, they died.

Lobotomy.......

And finally, we have everybody’s favorite mental illness cure, the lobotomy. The lobotomy was developed by a Portuguese neurosurgeon named Egas Moniz. He had heard that when the frontal lobe of a violent, feces-throwing monkey was cut away, the monkey became docile and quit slinging the shit. From this, he theorized that the frontal lobe was the hotbed of mental illness and by cutting it he could cure mental illness. And so he tried it on his human patients. By his own standards, the surgeries were a success, and lobotomies caught on. In 1949, Moniz even received the Nobel Prize for his efforts.

In America, one Dr. Walter Freeman took to the road in his “lobotomobile” and actually provided onsite lobotomies to anyone who seemed willing, from schizophrenics to bored housewives. His technique was to insert an ice pick into the eye socket and swirl it around a bit to “disable” the frontal lobe. Unsterile equipment and imprecise surgical technique aside, there was a problem that soon became apparent as the number of lobotomies multiplied. Quite a number of the patients weren’t cured; in fact, they became virtual zombies, unresponsive and brain-damaged for life. This making for fairly bad testimonial, the lobotomy faded into medical obscurity.

Insane Reasons Why People Used To Be Sent To Lunatic Asylums.......

Laziness......

If you’re lazy, you’re crazy – literally. Well, that’s if you lived in the 19th century, of course. Back then, people were sent away to an insane asylum if they showed signs of laziness. We’re not exactly sure what those signs were and what exactly defined laziness back then. Either way, sending someone away just because they can’t be bothered to wash the dishes or do laundry isn’t exactly normal, is it? We all get our ‘lazy’ days. Some days we feel more productive while other days we just want to stay in bed all day and watch reruns of Friends. Sometimes we’re all set to go to the gym while other days it seems almost impossible to muster up the energy to lift a leg, let alone free weights. Does that make us crazy? Absolutely not! You kind of feel lucky you live in the 21st century, don’t you? Freedom!

Novel reading......

Remember how we told you that you wouldn’t want to have been caught reading a novel in the 19th century? Here’s why: novel reading denoted craziness. That’s right! If you were caught reading a novel in the 19th century, you would be admitted to an insane asylum. Maybe people thought you were crazy for reading something of a fantasy nature, something that wasn’t factual. That’s the only logical reason, if that’s what you can call it, we have for this ridiculous reason for admission. Can you imagine innocently skimming the pages of a Nicholas Sparks novel only to captured and sent away to an insane asylum? It’s hard to imagine. Novel reading is so common these days; it seems crazy that you’d be locked away for doing it. Especially if you were reading, say, something as innocent as The Notebook. How could anybody lock you away for that?

Asthma......

Who knew that having asthma in the 19th century would land you in an asylum? It’s insane! Asthma is a common condition that many people suffer from in this day and age. It’s ridiculous that people were labelled ‘crazy’ back then for having it. However, it’s not as bad as it sounds, according to sources. It wasn’t that people were sent away specifically for having asthma. It was considered more of a symptom of mental instability. You know how people claim that watching violent movies or playing violent video games could lead to a person committing violent crimes? Well, that’s kind of how it worked with asthma. Healthcare professionals believed that having asthma could lead to mental problems. Obviously, they were wrong. Asthma and mental instability are, by no means, related. Our hearts go out to those poor asthma sufferers in the 19th century, they really do.

Epileptic fits........

Yet another insane reason people wound up in an insane asylum is epilepsy. Like with the asthma case, it wasn’t specifically for the fits themselves but for the fact that they were a symptom of mental instability – in those times, of course. It’s hard to believe what you’d be put away for in those times. Epileptic fits are still greatly misunderstood, for the most part. What we know for sure, however, is that there is no link between epileptic fits and insanity. In other words, there is no reason to believe that a person who experiences epileptic fits should wound up in a mental institution. Yet in the 19th century it seemed perfectly normal to get institutionalized for having epileptic seizures. It’s really heartbreaking when you think about it, isn’t it? And totally crazy! Fortunately, that doesn’t happen anymore and we’re incredibly grateful it doesn’t, that’s for sure.

Jealousy......

We’re all guilty of feeling a little jealous at times. None of us are perfect. It’s normal to feel pangs of jealousy. Whether it’s because your friend bought a new car when you still haven’t found the funds to take driving lessons or your sibling got married when you’re still single, or whatever, we’ve all been a little ‘’green with envy’’ at times, even if we don’t mean to. Sometimes you can’t help but wish you had it too. What isn’t normal, however, is being sent to an insane asylum for feeling those pangs of jealousy. That is nothing less than insane itself. Yet that’s exactly what they did to you in the 19th century. Jealousy, it seemed, was synonymous with insanity. Clearly it was wise to keep your envy under wraps two centuries ago if you wanted to steer clear of an insane asylum.

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