Did I ever tell you that I've been dead for weeks?

In the infancy of the Internet as we know it today it was afloat with weirdoes and strange things, and it was social. At a chat forum I used at the time I found myself chatting with a young, obviously disturbed and strangely fascinating young man. One day he intimated to me that he had in fact been dead for some time. He had stopped breathing, and had since found himself moving about in a state of living death. It was a condition he found puzzling, and he didn't dare telling his mother about it. There is of course no way to know whether he was pulling my leg or if he actually believed himself to be dead, but of all the strange ideas he entertained this was the only one he seemed to return to and not joke about. He didn't respond well to any assumptions that he was still alive, or joking.



You'd think the belief that you are dead while still living is beyond any semi rational being. Interestingly however it is not. While the disorder, known as Cotard's syndrome is exceptionally rare it has been described several times since its initial discovery in 1788: An elderly woman who had suffered a stroke believed that the stroke had indeed been fatal, and that she was physically dead. Supposedly she used a great deal of her post-mortem existence to plan her own rites of burial.

The syndrome is named after the French neurologist Jules Cotard who classified the condition as délire des negations (since identified as a different disorder from what is now known as Cotard's syndrome). While not the first to describe the condition he was one of the first to identify it as a disease. He described two cases in 1880 and 1882. He also quoted a great deal of earlier cases, described by a variety of psychological pioneers, Krafft-Ebing among them. Since then several hundred cases have been described, wherein the patients believe themselves to be dead, missing body parts, undergoing putrefaction, being immortal or simply not existing. Wikipedia lists a case where a fourteen year old at times believed himself and others to be dead, and also speculates that Per Yngve Ohlin, otherwise known as Dead - the most famous vocalist of Mayhem, suffered from Cotard's Syndrome. Sounds plausible to me. Another described case involved a 59 year old woman who had been bedridden for two years, under the delusion that she was paralyzed, or actually didn't exist at all.



My Internet chat buddy logically concluded that he had for unknown reasons become a zombie. A more bizarre case was described as recently as 2004, in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica: A young man believed himself not only to be dead, but also suffered from clinical lycanthropy. Specifically he believed himself to periodically transform into a dog. Presumably he also believed that the natural behaviour of undead dogs is to engage in sexual molestation of sheep, and he expressed a great deal of guilt over having porked a sheep in a state of psychosis. (He must be from Hedmark or something.)

Cotard's syndrome is not entirely understood. There is certainly a link to severe depression, and there may also be connections to anorexia, body dysmorphic disorder and other mental disorders. Possibly it could also be an extreme type of hypochondria, as Cotard himself theorized. Regardless of how it works let's hope the middle of the road nerds currently obsessed with sub par zombie entertaintment succumb to collective Cotard's, and the fad goes away with them. ;)