While many of us love to binge-watch television dramas and psychological thrillers, many of these conditions are rooted in real-life.
In some situations, psychological afflictions are so novel that even experts can’t decipher them or figure out how to proceed.
Here are 15 examples of people who stumped doctors:
1. Kim Noble’s 20 personalities
Kim Noble is a woman with DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder. While her legal name may be Kim, talking to her is likely impossible. Usually, people engage with her dominant personality, Patricia. Each personality that Noble displays have their own set of unique beliefs, abilities, and preferences.
“Sometimes, I can end up wearing five different outfits in one morning. Normal for me is driving to the shops and returning home with my boot full of groceries I didn’t want. It’s opening my wardrobe and discovering clothes I hadn’t bought, or taking delivery of pizzas I didn’t order.” – Daily Mail
2. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Dr. Oliver Sacks, a British neurologist, detailed a peculiar case in his book of clinical tales. A man named Dr. P had visual agnosia and would look at his wife and see a hat.
He could see, but his condition made making sense of the things he saw impossible. He would talk to doorknobs and mistake children for fire hydrants.
3. King George was further maddened by his medicine
King George III was a famously disturbed individual that would, at some points, have to be restrained. He would occasionally speak until he was foaming at the mouth and use the most peculiar vocabulary.
His condition has recently been diagnosed as a potential display of porphyria, a genetic defect.
What made matters worse is that his medicine contained arsenic, a common trigger for porphyria, making his condition worse.
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4. Phineas Gage was stabbed through the skull with a spear
Phineas Gage was stabbed through the skull while working on the railroad in 1848. The tamping iron he was holding went through his skull, through his brain, and out the other side.
He lived, but his personality was forever changed.
The damage to his frontal lobes was likely the root cause, but scientists still aren’t sure.
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5. Selective Emotional Detachment
Another example provided by Dr. Oliver Sacks is a man who had surgery to help his epilepsy. Before the surgery, he was known as a kind and loving husband. But after, he was cold and distant.
Even more strange is that before the surgery he hated the hospital, but afterward, he loved it and the people who worked there.
They ruled it as a “selective loss of responsiveness to a categorial group, his family.”
6. A man who wanted to be eaten
A man named Stephen explained that he had an obsession with cannibalism. This isn’t new and even has its own name, vorarephilia.
What was strange, however, was that he wanted to be eaten – by a large, dominant woman, no less.
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7. Victor of Aveyron, an untamable man
Victor was known as the “Wild Boy of Aveyron” when he was found in the forest in 1800. He was 12 years old and totally feral, which made him a valuable resource for psychologists and philosophers.
When he finally learned how to be toilet trained and taught to talk, they were actually shocked at how little he changed.
Upon further investigation, it was possible that he had an underlying condition, as autism expert Uta Frith believes.
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8. Seeing dragons
In 2011, a 52-year-old woman explained that she was seeing people’s faces turn into dragons. She explained that their faces were: “black, grew long, pointy ears and a protruding snout, and displayed a reptiloid skin and huge eyes in bright yellow, green, blue, or red.”
After a few MRIs and tests, doctors found nothing conclusive to explain her affliction.
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9. Fury at soft sounds
Adah Siganoff discovered that she was getting furiously angry at certain noises. Generally, her rage was induced by eating noises.
The condition is known as misophonia, and there isn’t a known treatment.
Often, these conditions are misdiagnosed as something else. In Siganoff’s case, they believed it was PTSD for years.
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10. Siezures that felt pleasurable
Ecstatic epileptic seizures are documented phenomena that result in orgasmic seizures throughout the entire body. The novelist Dostoevsky suffered from this condition.
Another sufferer explained:
“The feeling was almost out of this world. This led to a feeling of complete serenity, total peace, no worries; it felt beautiful, everything was great. […] Maybe the closest sensation that I know would be an orgasm, but what I felt was not at all sexual. […] It was almost religious.”
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11. Song stuck in your head
Susan Root has had a song stuck in her head for over four years. The song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” is constantly playing in her head and she physically can’t hear things in real life sometimes because of how loud it is.
Medical Daily said:
“She has already sought the help of doctors, neurologists, and therapists who have been unsuccessful in making the music stop. Root’s husband of 40 years even has to shout to get his wife’s attention because she sometimes can’t hear anything except for the phantom song in her head.”
Most people are hungry, at least a little bit, throughout the day.
For Landon Jones, however, that was never the case. Landon was 11-years-old when he realized that he was no longer hungry or thirsty at all. His parents had to force-feed him and there was nothing they could do.
Neurologist and expert, Dr. Marc Patterson explained:
“We looked very hard investigating Landon, and we’ve not been able to make any definite diagnosis.”
Landon had a history of seizures, but they didn’t seem connected. To this day there isn’t a real answer as to what is going on.
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13. A Norwegian woman with a German accent
A Norwegian woman named Astrid took a blow to the head in 1941. It turns out she had shrapnel in her brain as a result, and when she started talking, she had lost her accent and gained a German one.
Her condition, known as dysprosody, has happened before. It’s sometimes known as Foreign Accent Syndrom. But how it is related to a brain injury is still a mystery.
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14. A man thought his brain tumor was enlightenment
Dr. Oliver Sacks, who we’ve mentioned a few times now, met with one man named Greg, a Hare Krishna devotee. Greg had a tumor in his brain that caused motor function problems, eventually causing him to go blind.
According to Greg, however, it wasn’t a tumor that was causing his blindness, it was his mind’s eye opening as he reached enlightenment. He couldn’t be convinced otherwise.
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15. Mass hysteria
Mass hallucination and hysteria are incredibly rare. Since so many mental illnesses are individual in nature, things happening to groups are unlikely.
In El Carmen, Colombia, however, an entire town fell ill with numbness, stomach pain, and more.
To this day there is no explanation for what happened.
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