FAS & BIID
This afternoon, while writing for a Grapes of Rad special I’m putting together next week, I learned about 2 crazy-ass mental disorders I had never heard of before, courtesy of the Science Channel.
1. Foreign Accent Syndrome
There are some people out there who, after suffering some degree of brain trauma, start speaking with strong foreign accents! Seriously. It’d be like if Bruce Springsteen hit his head, woke up, & started talking like Borat! And it can be permanent. When I turned on the show, there were two people talking to each other who I thought were Italian Russian. Nope. Not at all. Pretty sure they were American.
Apparently people with this disorder are not actually speaking with a genuine accent, but their speech processing gets so out of whack, that the way they form their words is akin to people for whom English is not their primary language.
Weird, but not as weird as this:
2. Body Integrity Identity Disorder
OK, this is fucked up. People with BIID are totally convinced that they will be happier in life as amputees – so much so that they often seek out elective amputation of healthy limbs. WTF?!
On the show, 2 psychologists did a test where they had one of these fools who wanted to lose his right leg stand perpendicular to a mirror so that what looked like his whole body was really 2 left sides (like I used to do with those mirrored columns at JCPenney while my mom was shopping – I could lift up “both” my legs and levitate!), and this crazy bastard didn’t feel like cutting his limb off anymore!
Until, of course, he stepped away from the mirror.
Homeboy wanted to lop off his right leg just below the knee so badly that, since no respectable surgeon would do it, he immersed his leg in dry ice for 5 hours until all the tissue died & the lower portion of his right leg had to be amputated… just below the knee. Seriously?!