Depression may have caused woman to believe she was a chicken

New York Post ^ | July 28, 2020 | Hannah Sparks

[billorites]

When being a human gets too hard, the brain will cope with psychological stress in fascinating ways.

While most of the 260 million people worldwide who suffer from depression will have common symptoms, such as sadness, fatigue, disinterest and sleeplessness, an exceedingly rare few could lose their humanity completely — by assuming the identity of an animal, according to researchers at KU Leuven in Belgium.

In the Dutch medical journal Tijdschrift voor Psychiatrie, psychologists described the case of one 54-year-old woman, unnamed in their case study, who was found in her garden “clucking and crowing like a rooster” — a condition called zoanthropy, or the delusion of believing oneself is not human, but animal.

They described the woman as being “disoriented” during their examination, while also reporting an unfamiliar sensation in her limbs, “as if they were not fit for her body … and flapped uncontrollably,” the study read. The patient noted that she’d hardly slept in five days.

The woman, a pharmacy employee, was brought to the emergency room after her brother found her “displaying stereotyped behavior” of a chicken. She had no history of substance abuse or psychotic episodes prior. But the family attributed her behavior to the recent loss of a loved one, for which she had been suffering a two-month bout of depression — which runs in her family.

They also learned that she had been avoiding friends during that time, and had recently received negative feedback at work.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Remember the woman from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan who led a national campaign to try and get Fox to cancel it? Backfired bigtime by drawing even more viewers to take a look.

To no one’s surprise she was a relative of Mitt Romney.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Well, sweet young things from the 1960s were often called “birds”.

[glennaro]

A woman wanting to be a chicken is, since March, akin to wanting to change her sex ... to become what many American “men” have devolved into.

[BiteYourSelf]

Huh Wikipedia shows he’s still alive. I thought he had died years ago.

[EvilCapitalist]

I do like the show. As for the decay of culture, that is somewhat true. I doubt our current culture will ever produce someone as brilliant as say James Madison(Father of the Constitution), or Thomas Jefferson(Writer of the Declaration of Independence). Thankfully the founders were born before the invention of television.