A psychologist poured drain cleaner into a woman’s eyes and blinded her… because she wanted him to.
Jewel Shuping suffers from a condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) where she feels the need to be disabled. Blindness is her disability of choice.
“I really feel this is the way I was supposed to be born, that I should have been blind from birth,” Shuping said. “When there’s nobody around you who feels the same way, you start to think that you’re crazy. But I don’t think I’m crazy, I just have a disorder.”
Shuping’s desire to be blind was so strong that at one point she was “blind-simming” — pretending to be blind by wearing dark sunglasses, using a cane and exhibitingfluency in Braille. Shuping sought out a psychologist in 2006 to blind her, and he did so by putting drain cleaner into eye drops and putting a couple of drops in her eyes.
“This is not a choice, it’s a need-based on a disorder of the brain.”
Jewel Shuping
“It hurt, let me tell you,” Shuping said. “My eyes were screaming and I had some drain cleaner going down my cheek burning my skin. But all I could think was ‘I am going blind, it is going to be okay.'”
Shuping is “happier than ever” to live without her eyesight.
“This is not a choice, it’s a need-based on a disorder of the brain,” Shuping said.
Here’s what Dr. Michael First, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University who invented the term BIID, told The UK Daily Mail about the disorder:
‘Any major disability can be a focus of BIID, from amputation to paraplegia and blindness.
‘These people are aware that this feeling of theirs is unusual – they know it is coming from within them. They can’t explain it.
‘But because of this level of awareness we don’t consider this to be something that we would consider evidence of psychosis.
‘In the world of psychiatry cures are rare, very often it’s about asking how you make someone’s life fulfilling despite their condition.
‘Now the problem of course if you have a particular individual who wanted amputation or who wants to be blind – how do you know once you have done it that they are going to be satisfied?’
The UK Guardian has some more background on BIID:
BIID can be thought of as a body image disorder. The body image concept dates back about one hundred years, to the work of the neurologist Henry Head, who studied many patients with damage to the parietal lobe of the brain. Head found that these patients had profound disturbances of bodily awareness, and postulated that this region of the brain encodes what he called the body schema, a postural model of the body. Subsequently, the pioneering neuropsychiatrist Paul Schilder built on this and coined the term body image.
…
It is currently thought that BIID occurs because the affected limb is not represented in the body image, so that sufferers have no sense of ownership over it. Early evidence for this idea comes from Vilayanur S. Ramachandran‘s lab at the University of California, San Diego. In a very simple experiment, Ramachandran and his colleagues recruited a small number of BIID sufferers seeking leg amputation, and then prodded the affected limb while recording their brain activity using a technique called magnetoencephalography.
The study showed that the touch elicited a response in the primary somatosensory cortex, where sensory information from the leg is initially processed, but not in the superior parietal lobule, where the information would normally be integrated with the other types of sensory information to generate the body image. These findings suggest that BIID occurs as a result of a discrepancy between the body image and the physical form of the body, which would create cognitive dissonance, or contradictory thoughts and feelings.
There are some cases of people with BIID amputating parts of their body, and even in some cases severing their spinal cords. Some even pretend to be an amputee, just as Shuping pretended to be blind before she allowed drain cleaner to be poured into her eyes.
