BIID - syndrome of violation of the integrity of perception of one's own body. Chick's scary stories - and a manual in your pocket

I discovered this syndrome only today, was impressed, amazed and decided to bring it to the attention of the public, who had not yet heard about it. Although all the articles on the first page of Google refer to 2008-2009 and none of them mention the main problem that the national geographic channel told me.
1.What is it?
Body Perception Integrity Syndrome- a rare phenomenon that describes a person's desire to amputate one or more healthy limbs or the desire to be paralyzed.
People with BIID perceive certain parts of their body as completely unnecessary and interfering with their existence. Therefore, they are constantly filled with a passionate desire to amputate them, to get the right look.

This desire to become disabled seems so wild and contrary to basic human instincts that those who can be called BIID sufferers most often keep their desires secret. The current situation is that people with BIID syndrome do not have a great chance of receiving surgical care in licensed clinics, and this leads to the fact that they either turn to underground surgeons or attempt to amputate “unnecessary” limbs themselves.
The Internet space has become the starting point for people with BIID syndrome to come out of the shadows. On relevant forums on the Internet, BIID sufferers exchange thoughts on ways to achieve the desired goal: “Many are thinking about how to force doctors to amputate: whether to place the limb under the wheels of a passing train, shoot it, cut it off with a saw, or place it in a container with dry ice. So. For example, one American chemist did it by immersing both his legs in dry ice for 6 hours, and he achieved his goal: his dead limbs were then amputated.

Thoughts about getting rid of some part of the body first arise among those who want to “improve” their body in childhood. The syndrome manifests itself mainly in men, and, as a rule, in educated and successful men. However, as psychiatrists assure, such people are mentally healthy.

Dr. Michael First, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in New York, is interested in the problem of body schema disorder and is trying to find a way to approach this rare condition. In 2004, he examined 52 people who wanted to amputate their healthy limbs. Fest discovered that their psyche was quite stable. “You have to watch it to understand it. These people say that every moment of their lives they feel the incompleteness of their body. But this does not in any way affect their ability to establish connections with other people. They are fully aware of the real world,” Michael says about his research. In the USA and Scotland, some “volunteers” achieved amputation surgery without clear medical indications. Such a person, after the required operation (even after amputation of both legs), finally feels comfortable and complete, whereas all his life before he suffered from mental and physical inadequacy and felt sick.”
2. Suspected cause of BIID
Researchers suspect that this syndrome is of the same nature as other body image disorders, including anorexia, body dysmorphia (dislike of one's body), and gender dysphoria (gender identity disorder). At first glance, these abnormalities seem to be purely psychological, but it is possible that their cause can be determined by finding abnormalities in the functioning of different areas of the brain in patients.
The parietal region of the brain, which has a map of the body, is responsible for the integrity of the body.
In 2007, a group of scientists from the University of California conducted research on this disorder. They examined the parietal lobe of the brain. During the test, subjects were tapped on the leg; receptors sense the brain's response, imprinting the response in the parietal lobe. In response to touching the skin of a patient with BIID in the area where there should be brain activation, it is not observed, the parietal lobe does not respond, it remains completely inactive. Patients have an incomplete neurological picture of the body; their brain tells them that a certain limb does not appear to exist.
The assumption is that the problem is in the brain and The cause of the disease is physiological, not psychological.
3. Stories from the lives of patients
1) Josh says that he carefully prepared for the amputation of his own left arm, which he did with the help of a power tool. He says that before this he made repeated attempts to lose his arm. One day he put it under the trolley (but the cable holding the trolley did not break completely). He tried to saw off his hand on a circular saw, but his nerves gave out and he could not do it. He even went so far as to drive a car around the city and its environs for hours, sticking his hand out of the window, hoping that it would be knocked off by an oncoming object. Not a single attempt gave the desired result. But this time he was serious. Josh (whose real name will remain unknown to the reader because his family believes he lost his arm in an accident) says he trained to do amputations on the legs of cows and pigs that he bought at a butcher shop. He prepared everything he needed: bandages and bandages to stop the bleeding and a well-charged mobile phone in case he felt sick.
Now, years later, Josh says he feels great without his arm, and that the amputation ended the “torment” that had haunted him since high school. “It’s an indescribable relief,” he says in an interview with Newsweek, “Now I feel like my body is fine.”
2) The owner of the websites transabled.org and biid-info.org Sean O'Conor says that nothing short of surgical intervention can help him and visitors to his websites. “Psychotherapy, like psychiatry, is powerless in this matter. Drug treatment is useless “I myself am a typical example of a person who has gone through all this, but is convinced that it is all useless,” says Sean. He moves in a wheelchair, but has not yet found a definitive way to paralyze himself.
4. A separate category of patients whose illness belongs to a different nosology.
Psychiatrists classify people whose mental health is not all right in a separate category of “voluntary amputees.” “Improving” their body, they receive pleasure from their own physical suffering, like ordinary masochists. Such people, as a rule, remove their fingers and toes, but are in no hurry to part with them all at once. There is only one reason: a person has only twenty of them. And they need to be chopped in such a way as to extend the pleasure for as long as possible. Some of them deal with each finger in stages - first they tear out their nails, then cut off one phalanx, then, after a couple of months, the other, and only finally part with the stump completely finger, bringing themselves closer to “perfection,” “amputees” make do with a minimum of tools and antiseptics, and the operation process itself is simple and does not take much time. The finger is placed on a mini-guillotine or simply cut off with a large kitchen cleaver. Those who want to prolong the pleasure act slowly: first, with a scalpel or, at worst, an ordinary razor blade, they cut the skin, muscles, nerves, and then, without ceasing to get high, they break the phalanx of the finger. The most advanced ones go even further and cut off their genitals.

A doctor's practice can be the perfect inspiration for horror. Medicine can tell us about the real “walking dead,” werewolves, or our own killer hand.

"The Walking Dead"

Cotard's disease, or “zombie syndrome,” has become a real mystery for doctors. Those suffering from this disease are sure that they are either rotting alive or have already died, and everything that is happening around them is “life after death.” The real reasons illnesses are unknown, but possible ones include deep depression, schizophrenic tendencies and head injuries. Cotard's syndrome is not isolated as a separate disease - it is classified as a form of depressive-paranoid schizophrenia.

The disease was first described in 1880 by the French neurologist Jules Cotard, and since the 19th century these cases have been recorded more than once. The most famous one happened to a Scotsman who was badly injured in a car accident. After completing a course of treatment and leaving the Edinburgh hospital, he decided to take a break and went to rest in South Africa. Halfway there he was “covered.” By the time he arrived in South Africa, he was finally convinced that he had died in an accident and was now in hell. Even his mother, who went with him, could not convince him otherwise. The unfortunate man thought that she was actually sleeping at home in Scotland, and that her soul was accompanying him on his journey through hell.

Roaming Gut Syndrome

People with “fermenting gut” or the so-called “internal brewery syndrome” turn any food and drink into alcohol within themselves. That's why they're always a little tipsy. The cause of the disease is the inability of the stomach to break down sugar into carbohydrates - instead it engages in fermentation. In addition, the human body with a fermenting intestine is not able to process ethanol resulting from the consumption of starchy foods. For such people, one bottle of beer is enough to gain 0.37 ppm.

Fortunately, this is a very rare syndrome, with only 11 cases reported worldwide today.

Werewolf syndrome

Hypertrichosis, or excess hair growth, which is also often called “werewolf syndrome,” manifests itself, as you probably guessed, in excess hair throughout the body that is atypical for a certain age and gender. The syndrome can be either congenital or acquired - after a head injury, anorexia nervosa, or uncontrolled use of hormonal drugs. This disease mainly occurs in women. Only acquired hypertrichosis can be treated by eliminating the causes of the disease and physiotherapy.

Old children

Progeria is somewhat reminiscent of the “disease” from the film “The Strange Case of Benjamin Button” main character who was born a wizened old man and grew younger with age. In the case of progeria, the opposite happens. Children are born without any abnormalities, but after two years they begin to age quickly. The first symptoms: hair loss, the appearance of wrinkles. By the age of 13, such people usually live the entire life cycle. True, science knows of a case in which a Japanese man stricken with progeria lived to be 45 years old.

This is usually a congenital disease. For some reason, patients’ bodies turn on the aging mechanism earlier: a decrease in telomere length and disruption of stem cell homeostasis. Fortunately, progeria is rare - only 80 such cases are known to history.

Foreign Accent Syndrome

The so-called foreign accent syndrome looks truly “mystical”. After a brain injury, stroke and incessant severe headaches, a person wakes up in the morning and realizes that native language he can only speak with an accent. Moreover, with the accent of a country where he had never been. Doctors attribute this to damage to the parts of the brain responsible for speech. Unfortunately, the patient does not become bilingual, he only develops incorrect pronunciation. But who knows, maybe this rare disease is another key to unlocking all the abilities of the human brain.

Impaired perception of the integrity of one's own body

A strange syndrome, the carriers of which do not feel complete until one or another part of the body is amputated. They are not lovers of “thrill” sensations, their brain simply perceives a leg, arm, fingers (depending on the specific case) as a foreign object that belongs to anyone but them. Neither psychotherapy nor pills can save patients from obsessions, although there is a known case in which one such patient began to feel less doomed after taking antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy.

It is worth noting that such a hated limb is usually complete and healthy. She is not paralyzed, moves normally, responds to all commands nervous system. This is the main problem of BIID patients. The surgeon cannot amputate a healthy limb, otherwise he risks being sued. Therefore, patients often search for years for a surgeon who would agree to amputate their completely healthy and perfectly functioning arm or leg. To speed up the process, they take extreme measures, sometimes even at the risk of their own lives: they shoot themselves in the kneecap, freeze their leg, or take up a saw. People with BIID know exactly where the amputation should be done, and after the amputation they can indicate that such and such a part was not cut after all. After the operation, they feel unusually happy and regret, in their own words, that they did not do this earlier.

Alien hand syndrome

If in the previous case, the patients’ much-hated limbs are healthy and obey all the orders of the nervous system, then in the case of alien hand syndrome, they (the hands) lead a completely independent lifestyle, which usually does not coincide with the wishes of the owner. Another name for the disease is “Dr. Strangelove syndrome” in honor of the hero of Stanley Kubrick’s film “Dr. Strangelove,” whose hand sometimes spontaneously either raised itself in a Nazi salute or began to strangle its owner.

The symptom was first described by the German neurologist Kurt Goldstein in the 19th century. He observed a patient who began to be strangled by her own left hand in her sleep. Goldstein did not find any mental abnormalities in her. Only after death, damage was discovered in the girls’ brains that destroyed the transmission of signals between the hemispheres, which led to the development of the syndrome. The disease became a scourge in the 1950s after doctors began treating epilepsy by cutting the hemispheres. Moreover, in most cases the hand showed obvious aggression towards the owner.

A resident of Switzerland named Sebastian wants to get rid of one of his legs, believing that with one leg his body will become more perfect, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes on Sunday in an article devoted to such a practically unstudied phenomenon as Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) syndrome violations of the integrity of body perception, reports InoPressa.ru.

Reference: “People suffering from BIID syndrome perceive certain parts of their body as unnecessary, interfering with their existence. They are overwhelmed by the desire to amputate supposedly unnecessary body parts in order to gain the “correct” appearance.”

Sebastian's legs are fine, but without the slightest shudder he shows the place where one of them, in his opinion, should be amputated. This young man, the author of the article writes, is an engineer by profession, he has a good job, many friends, he likes to play volleyball and go to the theater. But since childhood, he has been haunted by the same thought: without his left leg, his body would be more perfect.

As a child, Sebastian, who suffers from BIID, collected newspaper clippings with photographs of soldiers maimed in war without arms or legs, and watched the Paralympic competitions on television in fascination. Fearing that he would be considered crazy, he did not tell anyone about his ardent desire to replace his left limb with a prosthesis.

According to experts, the number of people suffering from BIID in the world is measured in the thousands. This phenomenon gained fame in the 1970s - then psychologist John Money classified it as a sexual disorder. Today it is known that not everyone suffering from BIID associates their desire with erotic fantasies, but the phenomenon is still poorly understood, the article notes.

The desire to get rid of some part of the body arises in childhood, the reason is unknown. The syndrome manifests itself mainly in men, and, as a rule, in educated and successful men. Medicines have not yet been invented; talking with a psychiatrist can only help you live with this desire. Otherwise, psychiatrists assure, such patients are mentally healthy.

But not many of them manage to come to terms: on the corresponding forums on the Internet, BIID sufferers exchange thoughts about ways to achieve the desired goal: “Many are thinking about how to force doctors to amputate: whether to place a limb under the wheels of a passing train, shoot it, cut it off with a saw, or place in a container with dry ice."

The article mentions a video posted on the Internet that shows an American chemist immersing both of his legs in dry ice for 6 hours. Today he uses a wheelchair - his legs were amputated.

There is another opportunity to get rid of a hated limb: for 10 thousand dollars (USA) in “a certain country in a certain clinic” they can amputate anything. Sebastian does not have that kind of money, but even if he did, he says that he would not risk his life, the publication summarizes.

News edited elche27 - 12-04-2011, 20:28

Women are often skeptical about their bodies; Chloe Jennings-White, however, has surpassed many - she sincerely hates her legs and dreams of parting with them someday. A complex psychological illness does not allow Chloe to perceive her legs as part of herself; Jennings-White literally dreams of becoming disabled.

Amputation of one or another part of the body is a nightmare for many; We are not even talking about how much the loss of an arm or leg will complicate a person’s life - people are much more concerned about the purely psychological component. For Chloe Jennings-White, however, being able to give up her own legs is a dream - albeit an impossible one; Chloe has already found a surgeon who can permanently cripple her, but at the moment she cannot afford the operation.

Chloe Jennings-White's strange behavior is explained by the so-called body integrity disorder syndrome; People suffering from this syndrome at a subconscious level do not perceive certain parts of their body as part of themselves. Jennings-White has suffered from this syndrome since childhood; however, she heard about the correct name of this disease relatively recently.

As a child and teenager, Chloe hid her strange feelings from everyone; Only when she was alone did she allow herself to relax and bandage her own legs - so that at least for a while she would feel that they had disappeared. Having settled into a wheelchair ordered through the Internet for the first time, the woman felt better than ever - as if she had been born to live in a wheelchair. Chloe even thought about setting up an accident - which would once and for all deprive her of her hated limbs; However, it never came to that.

Chloe's wife, Danielle, at first had no idea about her friend's unusual obsession; Jennings-White confessed everything only after a back injury allowed her to wear prosthetic leg braces quite openly. It was while searching for a suitable brace model that Chloe first heard about body image disorder; After many years, Jennings-White finally realized that she was not the only abnormal person, and that hundreds of people around the world suffered from similar problems with their bodies.

Chloe managed to convince her wife that she took the decision seriously and was not going to regret the lost legs in principle. Chloe's story shocked Danielle, but later she was able to accept the strangeness of her life partner. Her friends also reacted with understanding to Jennings-White’s decision; alas, some still considered Chloe abnormal - after the woman’s story became public, she began to receive openly aggressive letters (even death threats) content.

BIID - syndrome of violation of the integrity of perception of one's own body.

A surprising deviation in the development of gender identity is body integrity identity disorder (BIID). People with this syndrome have felt since childhood that some part of their body does not belong to them, and they want to get rid of it at any cost. They do not perceive some part of their own body as component themselves, despite the fact that it works great. This leads to an all-consuming desire to amputate. And only after their leg or arm is amputated do they finally feel complete. 27% of carriers of this syndrome manage to find someone who agrees to perform such an amputation. Surgeons who perform such operations run a serious risk of being sued for removing a completely healthy limb.

The belief that an arm or leg does not belong to them and that they would like one or more parts of their body to be paralyzed often arises in such people from an early age, most often in childhood, sometimes in adolescence. A child with BIID scissors cut out human figures from newspapers in order to then cut off their leg, which he himself wanted to get rid of. Some experience excitement or envy when they see people who are paralyzed or who are missing an arm or a leg, something they would like for themselves. Sometimes it is at such a moment that they realize what, in fact, is their desire. Often they try to bring the desired situation as close as possible: for example, they pull their leg towards their butt with an elastic bandage; wear wide trousers so as not to see their shins; roll up their trouser legs and walk with crutches or use a wheelchair.

BIID patients often search for years for a surgeon who would agree to amputate their completely healthy and perfectly functioning arm or leg. If they fail, which is, of course, more often than not the case, it turns out that two-thirds of those who eventually undergo amputation were able to so damage an unwanted member of their own body that it still had to be amputated. Sometimes they do this at risk to their own lives: for example, they shoot themselves in the kneecap, freeze their leg, or take up a saw. People with BIID also know exactly where the amputation should be done, and after the amputation they can indicate that such and such a part was left uncut. After the amputation, they feel incredibly happy and say that their only regret is not doing it sooner.

We are our brain. From the Uterus to Alzheimer's (Dick Swaab).

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