I was infuriated to read about a woman who deliberately persuaded a (possibly over-gullible) psychologist to blind her.
For most people becoming blind would be a living nightmare - but for Jewel Shuping it was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream.
Jewel has Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), a condition in which able-bodied people believe they are meant to be disabled.
Her need to lose her sight was so strong that in 2006 she decided to blind herself - by having a sympathetic psychologist pour DRAIN CLEANER into her eyes.
According to Jewel, her fascination with blindness began early in childhood.
She said: "When I was young my mother would find me walking in the halls at night, when I was three or four years old.
"By the time I was six I remember that thinking about being blind made me feel comfortable."
As a child she would spend hours staring at the sun, watching sunspots and solar storms, after her mother told her it would damage her eyes.
In her teens she started wearing thick black sunglasses, getting her first white cane aged 18 and becoming fully fluent in braille by the age of 20.
Jewel said: "I was 'blind-simming', which is pretending to be blind, but the idea kept coming up in my head and by the time I was 21 it was a non-stop alarm that was going off."
Determined to make her dream a reality, Jewel found a psychologist willing to help her become blind - an act which she compares to a deaf person wanting to get a cochlear implant.
The psychologist put in numbing eyedrops - acquired by Jewel during a special visit to Canada - and then a couple of drops of drain cleaner in each eye.
Jewel said: "It hurt, let me tell you. My eyes were screaming and I had some drain cleaner going down my cheek burning my skin.
"But all I could think was 'I am going blind, it is going to be okay."
Despite the hospital's attempts to save her vision - against her wishes - they were permanently damaged, although it took around half a year for the damage to take affect.
There's more at the link.
I would have thought any psychologist worthy of the name would have diagnosed and treated her mental disorder, rather than pandered to it. To deliberately maim someone so clearly misguided and not thinking straight . . . if that's not professional malpractice (to put it mildly), what is?
What infuriates me even more is that she continues to excuse her behavior and justify it.
"If someone were to say that its fundamentally selfish to blind myself, I would say that it’s selfish to refuse treatment to somebody with a disorder.
"This is not a choice, it’s a need based on a disorder of the brain."
No, Ma'am. It's not a need. It's a psychosis. It's a disease. One doesn't cure a disease, or treat it, by encouraging and/or cultivating and/or giving in to it!
Peter
If her psychologist wasn’t disbarred (and criminally charged, too) it’s probably because this woman is at least sane enough not to identify him.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the FDA recommended dosage of drain cleaner, and was he licensed to prescribe and provide that particular substance?
ReplyDeleteWhat do you expect? This disorder (and the one where people think they should have a limb amputated) have been used by several to argue against the current vogue treatment for transgenderism. Since "transgender" is the new fad among the left, they're stuck now by not being able to deny these requests without looking like massive hypocrites. The people must be given what they want.
ReplyDeleteWhat will be real entertaining is when the leftist ideals of "free medicine for all" and "give people what they want" conflict (after all, transgender surgery, blindness, deafness, etc are all going to be greatly more expensive than just trying to be normal - even with treatment). Will the left realize that medicine should go free market so people's whims can be indulged, or will deviance have to be suppressed and a baseline of normality established in order to save costs?
The fruits of sown wind arise, should be an entertaining harvest.
Psychology as a medical practice is total quackery. Just listen to sad people talk about their problems and they feel better. That's worth 6 years in school to learn.
ReplyDeletePsychiatry isn't much better. They can use meds to depress or to stimulate but not to cure anything. They really aren't much better than people who sell St John's wort over the counter at the local hippie supply store.
This whole thing is just unbelievable... And the psychologist should have gone to jail for that...
ReplyDeleteAnd people wonder why aliens won't contact us!
ReplyDeleteHey Peter,
ReplyDeleteYou are correct, the psychologist should have been chucked in the hoosegow. Now she gets to ride the disability ride with us paying for everything...the ultimate dream of a self centered twit.
I expect that crazy bi*** will shortly be filing for SSDI if she isn't drawing it already.
ReplyDeleteIs there independent confirmation that someone else (psychologist or not) put the drain cleaner in her eyes, or are we all going by the word of this crazy woman?
ReplyDeletelisten to sad people talk about their problems and they feel better
If only that was always the case (that people feel better). I think that some pshrinks (PhDs and MDs included here) actually make people worse. Sometimes what a person most needs to hear is "Man (or woman) the fuck up and get over your own little self!" God knows I've needed such correction a time or two.
When I was in college and saw suburban orthodontists' sons walking around wearing fishnet stockings and tongue studs, I remarked to a buddy of mine: "These people are on a dangerous path, man. At this rate in few years if somebody wants to be really edgy they'll have to have one of their limbs sawn off."
ReplyDeleteI thought I was joking.
Re: Psychiatry Entropy goes in one direction, so expecting something like a cure for bipolar is perhaps unreasonable. The mood swings and extremes of a bipolar can significantly impair judgement, increasing the rate of lethally poor choices. Competent psychiatric treatment can significantly increase the lifespan of a cooperative bipolar.
ReplyDeletePsychologists can be productive in the same way a priest can, but there is also a lot of faddish bullshit.
bob the fool
I knew a man who was molested as a child and was struggling with homosexual urges as an adult although he was sexually attracted to women. His psychologist persuaded him that he was gay, that his attraction to women was just an effort to avoid the social stigma of being gay, and that he should embrace his gayness. What an evil bitch. I went to clubs with the guy and saw his behavior around women. He was not faking it. He has since gone back to women, but he tries to have the same shallow, temporary relationships with them that he had with other men, and he'll always be lonely.
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of an evil bitch listens to someone talk about how he was sexually abused as a child and suffers lingering effects that make it hard to have a normal life, and then tells him he should embrace the lingering effects and give up on the hope of a normal life?
But the psychologists who accept blinding their patients have determined conservatism to be a mental disease...
ReplyDelete