I have had brain cancer twice in my right parietal lobe. I lost the use of my left arm and a lot of use of my left leg after the final surgery. After a while, like 6 months, I started to feel like my left arm wasn’t mine anymore. I had learned of this condiotion from an episode of FX’s Nip/Tuck. That’s what was stuck in my mind through out. I knew it was my arm but it didn’t feel like it. I could look at my arm, but my brain didn’t recognize it as mine. I solved my problem by getting a couple tattoos done on my left arm a couple months later. Now i feel fine never had any more of those thoughts since i got those tattoos.

A study found that some of these people-a very specific group-suffer from a disorder of nerve development. The affected people have always wanted a specific limb removed, saying it doesn’t feel like part of their body. Not only does the limb never change, but the person has a specific point on the limb where their limb changes from them to not-them. This point doesn’t change. They don’t suffer from any other psychiatric disorders, at least not more than the average person. They’re perfectly normal people who are convinced that after a certain point on their limb, their limb is intrusive, not-them, and they want it removed at that spot. Researchers who study proprioception traced the path of the afflicted people’s proprioceptors. They found that in each case, the person’s proprioceptors ended at the line where they indicated they wanted their limb amputated. It turns out that proprioceptors don’t just tell the body its location in space. They also tell the brain the difference between “me” and “not-me.” These people weren’t crazy. They weren’t suffering from a psychological disorder at all. Because of a glitch in development, these people’s proprioceptors stopped short on one limb, so their brains works and designed and told them the limb wasn’t a part of their body.

Honestly, in a way these folks are already disabled, before the loss of any limb. Having a compulsion to physically disable yourself is something that requires as much medical help as any true physical disability ever would. I have my own disabilities, chronic pain, I could never fathom WANTING to live like I do, not in my wildest dreams, and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. To desire that, especially to the point it drives you to suicide, is, without a doubt, a clear disability.

I experienced something like this around 11-14 years old. I desperately wanted a limb cut off but I wasn’t picky about which. I attempted on several occasions to cut off a finger but never was able to go through with it-I still have scars on the bases of a couple of my fingers from trying though. It took up so much of my thoughts, I couldn’t stop ruminating over it. It was also accompanied by other self-harming behavior and an eventual suicide attempt, but it went away completely after the suicide attempt. I don’t think I had BIID. I think I had a host of other issues that made me just want to destroy myself, and once I started resolving those issues I no longer wanted to destroy myself.

I wonder if it might be possible to acknowledge the alienness of their limb, but help them to befriend it as a loving other who wants to assist them in life? Perhaps give their foot a name, give it a different color sock from the other one, treat it like a pet dog? I don't know, but maybe they need a different kind of accommodation.

There was a case of this last year in Innisfail, North Queensland, Australia last year. A man paid a friend to cut his leg off with a power saw. He was found dead, in his car, having bled out. The friend was charged with murder. It was known by the family that he suffered from this disorder. Tragic all round.

I am a left leg transtibial (below the knee) amputee resulting from accidental injury and infection. I had heard about BIID before seeing this, but this was interesting in the description of the neuroscience involved. I would urge anyone with a desire to lose a healthy limb to seek cognitive behavior therapy or other psychological treatment before going through surgery.

I'm almost impressed these people can handle the pain of harming their limb beyond saving. Sometimes the pain I feel gets so bad my ears ring and I can taste the stress.

That's totally messed up. I'm disabled, I have MS, and I walk with a crutch as my left leg drags. I cannot imagine wanting to live like this. These poor people are clearly unwell, maybe it's a neuro issue, maybe a psych issue, but either way it's got to be awful.

When I was still working as an ER nurse, we had a guy brought in by ambulance. He had stuck his left foot in a styrofoam cooler of dry ice until his entire foot and half his calf were frozen solid. It shocked us that this man would do something like this. At first, he told the paramedics he got drunk and must have fallen asleep and accidentally put his foot in the cooler... This guy had no drugs or alcohol in his system 🤨. That's when we figured out this was intentional. This was Independence Day night so we were dealing with lots of burns and drunk people. After the surgeon consult, he was taken for emergency surgery and I never saw him again. Even though I knew he had a mental illness, it still bothered me a lot. I had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (PPMS) a few weeks before and was coming to terms with it. I was only 24 and had a young son. I worked so hard to be healthy despite type 1 diabetes and then MS yet this man would disable himself. He was a bit overweight but overall healthy. I don't know what happened to him but I hope he went on to have a good life. I hope he was able to live a happy life without regret. He suffered from someone many people will never understand... I pray he is no longer suffering.

When I was a teenager, I wanted so bad for something to happen to one of my legs so it had to get removed. I'd imagine removing one leg, and even did do some self harm because of how little I cared. Even now as an adult, I don't exactly feel like my legs are a part of me, but I'm not in any rush to lose one of them. In an odd way, one of the large scars I gave myself has allowed me to feel that at least that one leg is truly a part of me. And yes, I'm in therapy. With the help of my therapist my wish to amputate one of my legs is because I want to have something that you can actually see is wrong with me instead of all the invisible mental illnesses I suffer in my head

You treated this subject with empathy and respect. There were no shocking imagery. And the only shaming was of the pedo doc. Thank you for the quality content.

Dysmorphia in general needs to be talked about much more. Most people have one form or another, often weight, body shape, etc, and not badly enough to take action. But its a *spectrum* It's too easy for people to not extend compassion to people at the "feel it so strongly they must take action" end of the spectrum, whatever form their dysmorphia takes.

As someone with many life altering disabilities, I feel for these people. Having such debilitating thoughts that you’re considering suicide… it’s hard to not feel sympathy. I hope one day we can cure the condition without amputations.

to me this sounds like 2 different disorders mixed into one - one being an actual disorder of not feeling like the limb belongs to you physically, and the other one more like an urge and crave to be disabled. Like one is about the specific limb and the other one about the goal of being disabled if that makes sense

I actually heard about this quite a few years ago, it was a story about one man in particular who used dry ice on his leg. They interviewed him afterwards and he was so happy, swimming laps in a pool with his one remaining leg

I learned about this in abnormal psychology class in the spring and it really challenged my view that I’m not a judgmental person. I had to put effort into being understanding.

I know I don’t have the condition but as someone with a lot of others(Chronic, painful, and started in childhood) the amount of time I’ve thought about cutting out the offending areas isn’t small. Especially in a bad mood, so if someone had a brain problem and genuinely thought about/needed it that doesn’t surprise me. Hope they can find peace in their lives, everyone deserves it.

Oliver Sacks wrote about something like this in "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat." From Wikipedia: ""The Man Who Fell out of Bed", is about a young man whom Dr. Sacks sees as a medical student. Sacks encounters the patient on the floor of his hospital room, where he tells Sacks that he woke up to find a strange leg in his bed. Assuming that one of the nurses had played a prank on him, he attempted to toss the leg out of bed, only to find that he was attached to it. Although Sacks attempts to persuade the patient that the leg is his own, he remains bewildered in an apparent case of somatoparaphrenia."

Hopefully this will not be too long. In Dec. 2003 my neck collapsed/broke severing and crushing nerves mostly based on my left. The surgeon done a fantastic job and with the aid of titanium plates, bone, screws I was repaired, but the pain in my left thigh was debilitating, my GP gave me a cocktail of opiates and other pain killers. The biggest killer for me was being told I can never work again. Dozens of scans, tests, x-rays took place, a neurologist checked my right thigh for nerve conductivity and found that normal, my left thigh had zero conductivity. Walking was slow but I coped with the support of my family. There was pain in the left thigh which was weird, often like ice needles akin to pins and needles but much more intense. Then more intense pain as heat, I could not make sense of it. I had other numb areas in my left arm and foot, these were numb and still are. I thought about whether the leg being amputated would stop the pain, I was told probably not, but as the leg was good except for the nerves it was unlikely. I had no wish to have the leg amputated it was the pain that drove the question. I gradually got used to the normal pain and endured the high pain. I then contracted cellulitis in my right leg and this was due, so the doctor stated, to my inefficient immune system. They prescribed antibiotics which I took, but they did not stop the infection. After 3 weeks and multiple antibiotics the infection was still evident. At this time my GP warned me that my lower right leg may have to be amputated. Thankfully in week 4 the antibiotics began to work. At no time had I wished for the removal of a limb, which made me think about the BIID sufferers that I'd read about in the early 80s. I was puzzled by the condition, but this post definitely cleared things up a bit. Mind you I had not thought about BIID for years, until I saw your post. Thanks for posting.

Last year fella in queensland here in Australia paid a newly immigrated friend to cut off his leg with a power saw. Not realising the legal implications but seeing that he could send money home to his needy familu, he agreed and they completed the grisly task. The DIID sufferer bled out and died before help could be summoned and the friend was charged with manslaughter, so sad

I’m glad to see Simon still has control of this channel too, Brain Blaze and Into The Shadows are my two favorites after all.

Weird side note - the black market BIID surgeon in Mexico was the uncle of the founder of notorious gaudy leggings MLM company LulaRoe. One of LulaRoe's shady practices is encouraging members to get sketchy discount weight loss surgery in Tijuana, where the founder has connections due to her uncle. The uncle, John Ronald Brown, has a few documentaries & podcasts about him, as he had quite the iffy history of medical malpractice, which is why he was doing hotel room surgeries in Mexico.

This is somehow more gruesome and terrifying than Simons True crime chanel. There's something about hurting your self which fills me with the chills.

From what I could find this is a brain defect where the ''hated'' part is no longer recognised as belonging to the body. Like an USB your PC doesn't recognise and wants you to eject.

This topic came up in my high school intro to psychology class, week 2.. I found the topic so distressing that i cut class and never went back to taking psychology. The notion made my insomnia worse. I wondered what would make someone think this option was rational and would i ever have that psychosis. I like your presentation better than how my class went about it. I think learning about it through you would have been less traumatic for me.

I had this condition when I was a teenager. I had severe mental illness, and this condition was the result of it. I’m glad I kept my eyes and never went blind.

As someone who's had a lot of nightmares and fears of losing limbs (especially fingers - my brain loves to feed me nightmares where I lose fingers specifically, and it is so upsetting), this is a very hard video for me to watch, but it is also an important discussion . There definitely seem to be several different reasons people feel this way though, and for them to all be lumped into one diagnosis is potentially harming at least some of them. I peeped at the comments and saw several examples, like people who have depression and just want to harm themselves need treatment for depression for example. Here's hoping the more that's learned the more directed help people get for their specific needs, and that our healthcare systems improve and cultural stigma problems so people who have varying conditions (like depression) are able to actually get help before they reach this point.

I can understand it. I had a huge foot phobia for years and the extreme fear, broken relationship with my family and sleepless nights made me wish I could just cut off my feet. I had regular panic attacks and didn't trust my family and friends. The idea of spending the rest of my life this way at some point was worse to me than the thought of being an invalid. Apart from the fear of the pain, what held me back was the knowledge that my phobia was in my head and I would still have it, even without feet.

I have 2 relatives who are anorexic and bulimic. They are emaciated, but are absolutely convinced they are overweight. What do they see when they look in the mirror? They have both destroyed their health. So terribly sad.

It is so sad to have these people out there with functional bodies who are choosing to get rid of them when there are so many of us born with disabilities who would give ANYTHING just to have working bodies. The mind can truly be a horrible enemy.

In a perfect world, this could be treated by fixing the brain, instead of breaking the body. However, I guess for a lot of sufferers, the science just isn't there yet.

Documentary filmmaker Melody Gilbert make a great film about this condition in the early 2000's called "Whole" -- it's really fascinating and humanizing, and features some of the individuals mentioned here, and interviews that include some of these exact topics, like the fact that sufferers can identify the EXACT physical spot where their limb ceases to be "theirs" -- the border between "yes, that is my leg" and "that is no longer my leg and needs to go away."

I remember something like this from Discovery Channel's Taboo series. This woman wanted to live her life in a wheelchair, no amputation needed, yet she also like hiking in the woods. It's a very weird psychological/neurological phenomenon, but I don't think it's in relation with gender dysphoria, since that's more hormonal-related during the gestation period of the fetus' development, IIRC.

It's interesting how so many of them seem to be of especially high intelligence and success, which I've noticed seems to tie to higher physical sensitivity. I've noticed with a small portion of skin on my thumb which I believe has mild nerve damage from how I have tended to hold things for years, where I can still feel it, but it somehow still registers as foreign to me, like cloth brushing over the rest of the thumb. I wonder if many suffering this have a similar, but much greater issue, not necessarily in the brain, but in the nervous connections to those areas of the body, resulting in a loss of proprioception, but not sensation or function.

Surprised that body mods havent come into this. Its not the same, at least all the time, but theres people who have had fingers, ears and noses removed by body mod artists. One UK artist got arrested a year or so ago for extreme body mods

1:25 - Chapter 1 - Discovery 3:20 - Chapter 2 - Is it all about sex ? 4:55 - Chapter 3 - Taking matters into their own hands 7:10 - Chapter 4 - Body integrity identity disorder 9:20 - Chapter 5 - Self mutilation 10:45 - Chapter 6 - Black market amputations 11:50 - Chapter 7 - An online community of wannabes 14:15 - Chapter 8 - Controversy

I don't know what to make of this story. Dysmorphia or fetish or both or neither. Like so many things concerning the human condition, we need to study it to understand it better, but because it is a taboo subject, we ignore it. 😢

Now I know the name for what I have. All my life I thought I was alone in this regard. Awesome-genuinely thank you.

My friend suffered fun this. He cut off his nipples, sewed up his naval, and tried to cut his little finger off. Before this he did extreme body modifications to deal with the urges. Split his tongue. Split his penis. Got scarification, piercings and tattoos. He was one of the first people to get his eyeball tattooed. Things got too much for him, he'd gone as far as he could do on his own, and eventually he left this world.

The neurologic cause seems like a plausible explanation for some of these cases, but that clearly does not explain people craving blindness or those who are removing disparate body parts.

That’s SO very tragic.. it’s like body dysmorphia on speed.. 💔

I see a lot of comments saying "I would give anything to NOT be disabled," and I get the sentiment. But body dysmorphic disorders aren't a "choice." First we have to separate the people with body integrity issues vs people who want to be generally disabled. Yes, I agree that anyone who wants to be disabled as the goal definitely needs psychotherapy because seems to involve a whole lot of dependency issues. But for someone whose goal is the physical amputation, the disability is not even part of the equation. Of course an unintentionally disabled person would not wish it on their worst enemy and "give anything to be ___ again," because they don't have a body integrity disorder. It's like telling a gay person to just stop being gay, or a transgender person to stop being trans. It's not a choice or a lifestyle, it's just the way they are. If there was "another way" to "fix" being trans without a ton of invasive medical intervention I'm sure there would be plenty of takers, in much the same way BIID patients would take any functional treatment for their condition. But sometimes the only thing you can do to make your body right is to just... make your body right.

I've sometimes thought that my life might be easier as an amputee. I definitely do not have BIID though. I just have deformities to right hip and knee, and my right leg is shorter than my left. Which means that when I'm standing, most of my weight falls on my bad leg. I could resolve the issue with a knee and hip replacement and surgical leg lengthening, but if it gets to the point where I have to do all that, I think I'd rather just have the whole thing removed and I'll just use a prosthetic that's as long as my other leg lol

I wonder if mirror therapy would help form connections in the brain that it is their limb

After being made disabled by a car accident (not my fault) I just can't comprehend how someone would choose this as an option

I think you're talking about two separate things. There's a BIG difference between wanting a limb gone because it feels alien and wanting to be an amputee/physically disabled.

Why can't you combine the two approaches, if necessary? Make therapy and meditation a prerequisite to surgery for (6 months? A year? 🤷‍♂️) and then, if that doesn't work, surgery could be considered as a solution.

Continue making videos simon! Please!

It seems that amputation helps. I hope a better way is found someday. Especially eating disorders which are very hard to treat successfully and have a 25% fatality rate. I can’t imagine what these people are going through.

There just HAS to be a better option than amputation/deafening/blinding for this. Do you know what I would give to have been born with normal, healthy ears? I've had three surgeries, painful infections, and hearing loss that genuinely made me feel excluded from the world at large. My hearing is now considered average, but I still suffer unique limitations. The idea that someone would *have* perfectly good hearing and *want* to get rid of it enrages me, legitimate neurological problems or not. It's not a lifestyle, it's a disability that's made every day of my life more difficult.

Right at the end there. Exactly what I was thinking. What if they change their mind after the fact? I'm not a psychologist but its clear something isnt right in their minds. Therapy and antidepressants can work wonders. Anyone wanting to change anything about themselves, you gotta give therapy a psychiatry a shot first. Once you commit, you can't go back.

Wait, so in the last example he must have actually had a normal parietal lobe if he was fixed by therapy. That case sounds more like extreme self-harm than a body map that excluded his legs. (I’d suspect the same of the people who cut off their own finger but the problem was actually with a leg…? Or maybe it affected everything on the left side but the leg more than other body parts?)

I’ve heard of this before and it scared the crap out of me, but it’s good to know it’s a deformity and I couldn’t possible acquire it! Well, not unless I had a tumor in my right parietal lobe, I guess.

Fascinating information 🤔 I can see one possibility of sadistic corruption , Sadistic mutilations for money in enthusiasm to do the task 😮

GD that was dark. I am struggling to remember the word for the sense that let's you know where your body is in space, like touching your nose...please remind me someone. But that alone would be hell for these people. Much less the self mutilation. I've watched pretty much all of the into the dark, and this is the only one that made me cry. I can imagine, but I can never know, the hell these people live through. Edit: I found it. Proprioception.

Interesting how seemingly all legitmate and not at all a fetish cases relate to having a specific kind of brain damage. Or at least a miswiring. It's probably not yet possible today, but there's pretty big hope for the near future with advancements in nanotech biological repair. Writing new neural pathways to confirm ownership of the limb would likely be akin to an irrigation system installation.

So interesting, and so sad. I don’t have this, but have frequently fantasised about having numb legs because they are constantly in pain. I feel like it’s close enough (although psychological discomfort as opposed to physical discomfort) that I have some empathy. Also, living with gender dysphoria is kind of similar. Times I have thought about attempting to perform my own chest surgery… obviously that’s not safe and not reasonable… but a 6 year waiting list and no end in sight to just talk to a gender specialist in the U.K. has been… hard.

Remember when we as a society would put people with these types of conditions in institutions where they could get help and be prevented from maiming and killing themselves? Man, what a backwards time that was.

Im an artist, musician, and a martial artist. I can't imagine how or why someone would want to lose any of that...

There was a show called "Mental" (think House but for psychiatric disorders, only ran 1 season) that covered this disorder.

I wonder if anyone thought to give these people antipsychotics ...the results may be suprising, specially when combined SSRI

A fascinating exposition of a problem few people are able to understand. Very thought provoking. The brain is an incredible thing, how mind and brain work together is endlessly interesting and before anyone judges anyone else, they should at least attempt to gain an understanding of the relationship of the physical brain and mental functioning.

Taking low self esteem to a whole new level, that is, a whole new lower level. I’d never heard of this. Horrifying.

Have an episode idea Simon. You should cover Danny Casolaro and "The Octopus.". Super intriguing stuff.

I'm transgender. The regret rates for people who have transitioned are incredibly low. If you compare them to things like people who had kids, the regret rate is fifteen percent for having children. The regret rate for having a transgender surgery is about one percent. Most common necessary surgeries have regret rates of about five percent up to fifteen percent or more.. I think it would be important to look into the people that have already tried removing their limbs and see what their rates are. There will always be outliers. Doctors do make sure that transgender patients are really serious. I had to have a minimum amount of therapy with a transgender specific psychiatrist who was able to prescribe me meds if she thought I needed them for other conditions. Both my surgeons needed consultations before I ever underwent anything permanent. I think a big part of helping people with this disorder would be treating them like it's real first of all. And I think it would be a good thing to make sure that there weren't other options that could be done to migitate without the extremes of full amputation. My partner is also transgender and an amputee from cancer. I don't say this sort of thing lightly because I know it's a pretty big deal to have parts removed.

The human mind is too complex for its own good. The vast amount of horrifying mental afflictions we suffer is the price we pay for the intelligence we have….in some dark, twisted way. As someone who has suffered with bipolar disorder and PTSD for over a decade…I’ve come to see my brain as my own worst enemy. Instead of feeling grateful to have thoughts and feelings, I wish I thought and felt nothing at all because the thoughts and feelings are almost always bad instead of good. How do you fight against your own mind? How do you fight YOURSELF? These questions wrack my brain nearly everyday. Honestly, it seems like a hopeless battle to me. BUT….here I am….and I’ll still show up tomorrow, and the day after and the day after…..until….I don’t know. I hope everyone is doing okay! Keep your head up!

I'm permanently disabled, not from anything done intentionally. I am also transgender. But I recognize the fact that these people do in fact have a disability. A condition to make them feel this way. And they deserve help. They deserve to feel safe and ok. Im not sure how we would be able to help them best, but I wish more research into options could be done so people could live happy lives. With or without the parts of their body that are uncomfortable. The only part I have a problem with is the term "transable", I don't like it. But I understand there may not currently be better terms, and we may not find better terms.

my mom knew a girl, who was convinced & obsessed with 2 of her fingers on her left hand "weren't hers" and after she reached adulthood, she had them amputated (idk if she did it, or by doctors, no idea) & she is "normal" & happy ever since! its a real thing & kinda crazy, but after they get rid of the "wrong limbs" these ppl are often times "back to normal", from what ive seen 2. hand (pardon the pun) but still, its real! i saw her without her pinky & ringfinger! totally normal women otherwise!

As a disabled person and as a trans person, I support these people and do see how their experiences are similar to mine. It's a neurological condition they cannot help anymore than I can help my disabilities

This physically hurt to watch! At least most of them don't regret it.

i have issues with proprioception (not biid) but i understand that sensation on a personal level - it’s so incredibly hard to even put into words.

As a disabled person, as long as they advocate for accessibility, go for it. Being disabled isn't easy and I imagine these people know that

It's amazing what our society decides is your right for self-control and what's acceptable to treat and what's not. Like with euthanasia. You can have DNR and force medics to let you die, but you can't die even if your life has lost all of its quality and is just full of pain and suffering and is guaranteed to not get better. And punishing people for drugs and not helping them, while happily selling alcohol.

I love the latest editing of into the shadows, its perfect.

I only knew about this being a thing because it was featured as a case in one episode of House MD, but I thought it was exaggerated for the sake of creating drama. Quite fascinating to think that this actually happens to real people, the thought of someone willingly becoming disabled sounds as counterintuitive as it gets.

As someone that knows I'm going to be in a wheelchair before I'm 50, I seriously hope they get some help. Like actual help not cutting their limbs off help.

I just feel a need to clarify that BIID and being transgender are completely separate and distinct in all modern medical and scientific literature. There are surface-level similarities in the way certain bodyparts feel 'disconnected', but the desire for a trans person is to still have a healthy and functioning body, just one with different sex characteristics. Any scars or medical issues from surgeries are considered 'trade offs' for better mental health, they are not the goal unlike BIID.

This is fascinating and quite bizarre. Great work with it, Simon, as always.

If studies show that this is a real disorder, why is medicine not willing to help by performing a safe and clean removal or amputation?

This is crazy. I may really be disabled one day and I don’t want to be. I don’t want to depend on others. I have Rheumatoid arthritis and it has hit me kinda bad this year at 59 years old. I don’t want it. I have no desire to be down to where I can’t do much. I don’t want to be crippled and for my hands and fingers to be twisted up. I like to paint, sew and make things. It is insane to want to do that to yourself!!

We don't have to understand something entirely to respect it.

i found this channel 2 months ago im a person who loves learning about things, the stuff that people dont think about be it crime murder or drugs and there effects love how these videos fully explain stuff to me in a professional and easy to understand fasion i learn alot keep it up 10/10 content.

This sounds like a disease that can helped with high dosages of psilocybin and psychodelic therapy. Psilocybin makes you more responsive to therapy and increase synapses in the brain so can help with the anatomical problem. It probably wont cure but it is worth the shot.

I remember the story of Jewel Shuping in the news. That psychiatrist is a terrible person. She basically identified as blind and learned Braille and everything. I hope that psychiatrist lost his license.

In my teenage years I was in a car accident and struggled with occasional electric shock sensations to my left shin, often leaving the surrounding area numb and it always happened when I would be sitting in class, distracting me. I wanted to remove that leg so bad. Last year I got a tattoo on that calf and even though it still happens occasionally, i love that tattoo too much lol

I wonder if this condition is mostly asymptomatic, because most humans don't want to cut off a body part, even if it does not feel like their own. 🤷 So in order to do that you need both the feeling a body part is not your own and the urge to have control to not just let it be. And the lack of pragmatism to conclude it is helpful no matter who controls it.

Im a person with bidd and in Sweden at the time I asked the doctors for help cause I was afraid that I wanted to cut of my finger they locked my up for 7 months... and I tried to chop it of 4 times and each times it was stitched back against my will. On the 4 attempt thou it started to go into necrosis so they literally stitched back a dying finger on my that I didn't want, and under all that time they kept telling me ofc I wanted my finger, which I ofc didn't. In the end I got to meet another doctor and finally she knew of the bidd condition and saw how depressed and desperate I was to have try and almost succeed to chop of my own finger with a kitchen knife without any sort of drugs in me, so she went through with the amputation and gosh it was the most weird but amazing feeling ever to wake up and not feel that heavy anxiety lift from my chest when I saw it I'm rly grateful for people's that actually read in to these kinds of things;3; also my finger was on the left side and I have a Gid disorder aswell haha 😂 well take care people's ❤

Anything with John Munny as a contirbutor and "medical professional" makes me crynge.

In your opening example it was ' ... an INVINCIBLE obstacle' Simon ... invincible ... not "invisible" lovey. Changes nuance slightly. Brilliantly researched though and I learned plenty.

I love this channel so much, but the way Simon pronounced “guillotine” at the beginning just killed me 💀

Being trans, this should make some form of sense to me. And I can sympathise with it... But just as we are forced to go through much to prove ourselves. I think doctors should do their best to fix what's wrong in the brain, before taking the leg. But I can absolutely sympathise. It's difficult to comprehend how difficult it is to live, unless you're going through something similar. I see a lot of people comparing it to trans people in the chat, and equally, people being quite transphobic, thanks for that. The doctors don't just throw us down a hall and start lopping parts off of us as we fly out the door into a dress / suit and magically become a woman. It's a huge process, and doctors do their best to avoid being helpful. To question everything we do, to doubt us as much as they can. I think there are definitely better ways to deal with us, and equally, with them. To sufferers, know you're not alone. I hope you can get the help you need, regardless of what that help is. We all deserve to live life without suffering.

I think more work needs to be done to make sure someone actually hs BIID before doing anything drastic. You might be surprised how many "medical professionals" are doing it with no true evidence tat the person truly has the disorder and is just disabling people willy nilly rather than looking for the underlying mental health. I'll note that at least one person had complext PTSD and was being actively abused when they were convinced to become disabled and is traumatized by that past.

I sympathize with these people’s plight. It’s tricky for me though, as I am an involuntary amputee. I wish I could switch places with someone who wants this.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this episode was Karl Rupecht Kroenen from Hellboy

This is a wild disorder. Like the mental version of Krokodil

Fixing a problem between the ears by mutilating a healthy body is commonplace in our mad world. I hope that one day we'll be able to fix problems in the brain better and stop with this horrific butchery. It's a miracle to be born with working parts, and a tragedy to despise them.

There's a guy in Canada that used dry ice to remove lower leg .......the lady that let someone put chemicals in her eyes to go blind was nuts

Unfortunately there are also people faking it for money and attention, making it even more difficult for legitimate sufferers to be taken seriously.

They should pair people with BIID up with disabled people who are missing the limb in question and do a limb transplant. They've done lots from dead bodies and they're getting better at it. So why not take the limb from someone who doesn't want it and give it to someone that does? Obviously it would require blood testing and such to make sure they're a match, but still worth looking into.