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Originally Posted by Claire_C
Hello all.
I would like to make a few points that seem to be lost somewhere in this discussion.
Body Identity Integrity Disorder is a real illness. It's not Munchausen's (nor by Proxy) and it's not hypochondria. It's an inexplicable desire for disability that in the vast majority of cases goes back to very young childhood. (see http:/www.biid-info.org )
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In my previous post, I said that maybe it's from kids imprinting onto disabled people they've seen and wanting to become like them.
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Someone asked what the medical community "thinks" of BIID and what resources there are. To be quite frank, there are NO resources available to sufferers of BIID because it is so rare that the vast majority of doctors and mental health professionals haven't heard of it.
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How do you know that most doctors and psychologists haven't heard of it? Plenty of people have heard of amputee wannabes because that had been on shows like CSI.
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However, mental illness is not "disgusting." I have a real condition. Having any kind of mental condition (be it BIID, or schizophrenia, or Alzheimers, or depression) doesn't make a person any more disgusting or creepy than you are for being deaf. We all have our issues. I have mine. You have yours. How is one person's health issue "better" than someone else's? Do you subscribe to the disability heiriarchy? It's ok to be deaf, but it's not okay to have some rare neuropsychological condition? Seems hypocritical to me.
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Saying that BIID is real doesn't make it so. There are tests that can show that people are deaf. How would other people be able to determine if someone has BIID? Pointing to a BIID site isn't enough. It could've been written by people with BIID. How about independent studies by non BIID people?
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Do a little research online and you'll find that BIID sufferers who have actually acheived their goal are in the vast majority very satisfied with the results and the obsession goes away, allowing them to get on with life.
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How can you show that the vast majority of them are happy if they achieve their goals? Are there any studies that do not relay on anecdotal evidence? Anecdotal evidence is not good evidence because it can be cherry-picked.
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Those of us who don't want to or can't go that route are left with pretending as the only way to deal with the obsession and feel somewhat mentally normal. I am still in therapy, and my psychologist is very supportive of my pretending. For those of you who have said we should "get help"...I did get help, and the help I got was for my therapist to encourage and support the only way I have ever found to deal with BIID...to use a wheelchair.
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The issue with pretending would be the use of services meant for those who physically need them, like spaces on buses. Sign language interpreters and relay operators are finite resources. Would deaf pretenders want to use them up? If they do that, they'd degrade the lives of deaf people who have those resources taken away from them.
In an earlier post, I posted a link about a deaf wannabe who had low self-esteem. How many transabled people are like that? That is also mentioned as an attitude disabled people have towards transabled people
here.
Here, explanations by transabled people include feeling alienated from others and then feeling empathy for disabled people who are also alienated, then becoming obsessed with the disabilities. How about working on the feeling of being alienated?
I also wonder what transabled people would do if they were sent back to the Paleolithic Age.