The fascination of human mind led to the ultimate interest in psychology and the ultimate interest led to the desire to become a psychologist. But the misconception of losing my sanity along the line of this profession discouraged my parents and banning me to ever pursuing the career. So instead of becoming a psychologist, I am becoming an Engineering. However, just because I can’t pursue the career doesn’t means I can’t pursue the knowledge.
I’ve been studying about human behavior and psychology for quite a while now, but the acknowledgement of some of the mental illnesses were unintentional and unexpected. Here’s some of those unexpected encounters.
Cotard's Syndrome or Walking corpse syndrome
Cotard’s Syndrome also known as Walking corpse syndrome is a mental illness where the patient become delusional and believe that they are dead/ don’t exist or lost a limb.
I came to know about this mental illness through the book The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn in where the main protagonist suffering from agoraphobia talks about a patient who had Cotard’s Syndrome and refused to leave the local cemetery, believing that he was dead and the cemetery was now his real home. The most shocking news came to the surface when the doctors ran some test and the result showed that, the affected patients brain functioned nearly the same way a dead person’s brain would. Hence the name walking corpse syndrome has been created.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)
Dissociative Identity Disorder also known as Multiple personality disorder is a mental illness where an individual developed multiple distinct personalities, with their own preferences, opinions, sexualities, ages, gender, likes and dislikes. One patient described it as multiple persons living in one single body. People with this mental disorder experience switches where another alter takes the control leading to short time memory loss.
The existence of this metal disorder also came to my knowledge by reading a book. I don’t remember the books name nor the writer, as it was during my fanfiction reading phase and I read thousands of fanfictions without knowing or checking the name of the books. But I clearly remember the story as it came off as a weird plot and something the writer made up to achieve a unique story line. The main protagonist in the book was an actress, who had DID but unlike many other patients, she only had two alters, one of them were charming, bubbly, extroverted but very bad at acting, while the other one was cold, distant, introverted but a good actress. They both developed an understanding and a switching pattern.
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental illness where the individual suffers extreme hallucination, detachment from reality, delusions, abnormal thinking patten. Men usually start to show the symptoms of Schizophrenia in their early to mid-20s while women begin to show the symptoms in their late 20s. It is extremely hard to maintain a normal life for people suffering this mental illness as some episodes can be life threatening for them and others.
Well, the first time I heard about this illness was again from reading a book. This time it was from the book Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho. When the main protagonist, depressed suicidal Veronika decides to commit suicide but failed miserably, the government admitted her in one of the mental institutions where she met a boy who was suffering from schizophrenia. Even though the story mostly revolves around Veronika, all the other characters including the schizophrenic boy interest me more than the main protagonist. Hence the study about schizophrenia started.
References
Cover image- Source
Cotard's Syndrome image - Source
DID image - Source
Schizophrenia - Source
I actually had more on the list but I’ll stop for now as it’s getting way too long and I am slightly getting tired. Whoever read this hope you like what you’ve read, in the future maybe I’ll write about the other mental illnesses I’ve encountered.
For now, thanks for stopping by :’)