There Is A Disease That Makes You Believe You're Dead

It's called Cotard's Syndrome. It's also known as walking corpse syndrome (which makes it sound terrifying) and people who suffer from it believe they're dead.

Nope, this isn't out of The Walking Dead. Cotard's Syndrome is defined as, “a rare mental illness, in which an afflicted person holds the delusion that they are dead, either figuratively or literally.” Those who suffer from the illness have a distorted reality in which they believe they in fact are dead — yet still walk among the living — or parts of their body, either limbs or internal, are slowly decomposing.

Esmé Weijun Wang first wrote about Cotard’s syndrome in a story for The Toast, and recently talked to the Washington Post about her struggles with the illness. On a flight from London to San Francisco, she fainted and came in and out of consciousness for hours. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her, and back on land Wang felt completely different. She felt like she was dead.

“I was convinced that I had died on that flight, and I was in the afterlife and hadn’t realized it,” she explained to the Washington Post, “That was the beginning of when I was convinced that I was dead. But I wasn’t upset about it, because I thought that I could do things [in my life] over and do them better.”

She was also convinced her husband and dog were dead too even though her husband assured her they were very much alive.

Wang “found herself in a place that looked just like her old life but evoked no emotion in her, which led to anxiety, fear and agitation. She frequently descended into catatonic psychosis, a condition marked by periods of not being able to move, interspersed with overactive movement.”

Wang also had to process with the firm belief she held that she was dead. And she struggled to go on living day to day. What's the point when you're already dead? She told The Toast

"Why did I behave in the manner of someone who was alive, when I believed, to differing levels of absolutism, that I was dead? Most of the time, I was able to stuff down the despair enough such that I continued to — pointlessly, in my mind — brush my teeth, sometimes wash my hair in the sink, and report my symptoms to the phantom who claimed to be my doctor."

The feeling of being dead is just one that those with Cotard’s syndrome have. Some patients do suffer from suicidal thoughts, as well as depression and anxiety.

And, even worse, doctors aren't even sure what causes it but can trace it back to some forms of mental illness. However, cases have also been linked to something as commonplace as migraine headaches. In Wang’s case, she thinks it has something to do with her Lyme disease.

Thankfully, Cotard’s syndrome generally doesn’t last forever. For Wang, it lasted two months, and after that she returned to her normal every day life knowing she was truly alive. 

This is kinda the real life version of zombies...scary!

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