This following a suicide attempt and a big emotional shock, something has "stuck" in his brain!
This is called Cotard syndrome: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndrome_de_Cotard but in "extreme" version ... Extremely rare but true!
2 items:
First interview of a dead (living) man
23th May 2013
Name: Graham
State: Cotard syndrome
"When I was in the hospital I kept telling them that the pills wouldn't do me any good, because my brain was dead. I had lost my smell and taste. I didn't need to. to eat or talk or do anything. I ended up spending my time in a grave because it was the closest place to death I could find. "
Nine years ago, Graham woke up and discovered that he was dead.
He was in the grip of Cotard syndrome (see note at the end of the article). People in this rare situation think that they, or parts of their body, no longer exist.
For Graham, his brain was dead and he thought he had killed him. Suffering from severe depression, he had attempted suicide by putting an electrical device in his bath water.
Eight months later, he told his doctor that his brain was dead or, at best, missing. “It's really hard to explain,” he says. "I felt like my brain didn't exist anymore. I kept telling the doctors that the pills wouldn't do anything to me because I didn't have a brain anymore. I had toast it during the bath." .
The doctors found that any attempt at rationalization was impossible with Graham. Even sitting there talking, breathing - living - he couldn't accept that his brain was alive. "I was upset. I didn't know how I could talk or do something without a brain, but as far as I know I didn't have one."
Disconcerted, they finally made him meet the neurologists Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter, Great Britain and Steven Laureys of the Belgian University of Liège.
“This is the one and only time my secretary told me: it's really important for you to go talk to this patient, because he's telling me he's dead,” Laureys says.
In limbo
“He was a really unusual patient,” Zeman says. Graham's belief "was a metaphor for how to feel the world - his experiences no longer moved him. He felt he was in a limbo between life and death."
No one knows how many people commonly have Cotard Syndrome. A study published in 1995 of 349 elderly psychiatric patients from Hong Kong found two people with symptoms resembling this syndrome. But with good and quick treatments for mental disorders like depression - a condition most often found in Cotard - that are readily available, researchers suspect the syndrome is exceptionally rare today. Much of the academic work on the syndrome is limited to studies of a single case, Graham's, and some people with Cotard have reportedly died of starvation, believing they no longer needed to eat. Others attempted to dispose of their bodies with acid, which they saw as the only way to free themselves from their "living dead" state.
Graham's brother and his caregivers make sure he has eaten and watch him. But it was a joyless existence. "I didn't want to be in front of people. It was no use," he said. "I had no fun at all. I used to pamper my car, but I don't come near it anymore. Everything I was interested in no longer exists."
Even the cigarettes he enjoyed smoking are no longer successful. "I lost my sense of smell and taste. It was no use eating because I was dead. Talking was a waste of time because I never had anything to say. I even had nothing to say. no real thoughts. Nothing had meaning. "
Low metabolism
A glance into Graham's brain gave some explanations to Zeman and Laureys. They did a positron emission tomography to record the metabolism in his brain. It was the very first such exam done with someone with Cotard. What they found was shocking: the metabolic activity in large areas of the frontal and parietal brain was so weak that it seemed to be that of a person in a vegetative state.
Some of these areas form the part known as the "default mode network" - a complex system of activity thought to be vital to self-awareness and corresponding to our theory of mind. This network is responsible for our ability to remember the past, to think about ourselves, to create a sense of self and to allow us to realize that we are the responsible agent for our actions.
“I have analyzed CT scans for 15 years and have never seen anyone standing, interacting with people, with such an abnormal scan result,” says Laureys. "Graham's brain works like someone's during anesthesia or while sleeping. To see this pattern in someone awake is very unique to my knowledge."
Graham's scans may have been affected by the antidepressants he was taking and, as Zeman points out, it is unreasonable to draw too many conclusions from scans on one person. But, Zeman says, "it seems plausible that a reduced metabolism gave him this altered view of the world, and affected his ability to reason about it."
“There is a lot that we don't know about how to define consciousness,” says Laureys. Unusual cases like Graham's at least add to our understanding of how the brain creates self-perception and how it can deteriorate.
For Graham, the brain scans didn't mean much. "I felt fucking weak," he says. At the time, his teeth had turned black because he no longer bothered to brush them, reinforcing his belief that he was dead.
Graham says he really had no idea about his future. "I had no option but to accept the fact that I had no way to actually die. It was a nightmare."
Haunted by the grave
This feeling prompted him to visit the local cemetery on occasion. "I felt I might as well have stayed there. It was the closest place to death I could find. But the police would still come and get me and take me home."
There were unexplained consequences of his illness. Graham said he had "beautiful hairy legs". But after the Cotard, all his hair fell out. "I looked like a plucked chicken! I save on shaving, I guess ..."
It's nice to hear him joke. Over time, much psychotherapy, and medication, Graham gradually improved and is no longer struggling with the disease. He is now able to live on his own. “His Cotard regressed and his ability to enjoy life returned,” Zeman says.
“I couldn't say I'm really back to normal, but I feel a lot better now and I go out and bustle around the house,” Graham says. "I don't feel that dead brain anymore. Things just seem a little weird to me sometimes." And did the experience change her feeling about death? "I am not afraid of death," he said. "But that wasn't the thing to do with what happened - we're all going to die one day or another. I'm just lucky to be alive today."
sources: http://bistrobarblog.blogspot.fr/2013/0 ... -mort.html et ttp: //www.newscientist.com/article/dn23 ...? full = true
Professor Steven Laureys, from the University of Liège, has studied, for the first time in the world, the brain of an individual who is believed to be an undead. The patient, a 49-year-old Englishman, is really suffering from a neurological disorder, reveal the pictures taken by the neurologist from Liège.
"Doctor, I have come to prove to you that I am dead." My brain is dead, in a living body. I'm an undead. It was in these terms that Graham, a 49-year-old Englishman, presented himself to his family doctor nine years ago.
Eight months earlier, the English patient had wanted to "play Claude François" to commit suicide: Graham, then 40 years old, super depressed after his wife had just left him, plunged into his bathtub holding an electric appliance . But the pellets jumped and the expected result was not there. Well, yes, but only half: Graham, he really believed himself dead after this accident, even if he was not in reality. “I felt that my brain no longer existed. I lost it in the bathtub, ”he explains.
From psychiatrists (who shock him) to neurologists (who prescribed him antidepressants and lithium), Graham ended up landing last year in Belgium, at the CHU de Liège, where Professor Steven Laureys, world specialist in coma and altered states of consciousness, examines it. Finally, we stop taking him for a madman! The examinations carried out by medical imagery reveal an anomaly which can, indeed, alter his perception of reality. Because his brain works in tune with ... that of a comatose! The metabolism of glucose in several regions of his brain is displayed in slow motion, made completely surreal while the patient is standing in front of the doctor ... "I had never had a consultation where a patient said to me:" I dead sense ”. I replied: "But your heart is beating, however ... And you breathe ..." But he did not perceive it like that, "explains Steven Laureys.
The zombie has, since his diagnosis in Belgium, regained some color: he finally dares to leave his house when he previously spent his days at the local cemetery, and, even if the reality still seems to him sometimes "bizarre", he manages to live and even to joke.
http://www.sudinfo.be/733794/article/re ... r-et-en-os
