Mark Turner's Mysterious World: First interview with a dead man

Visiting a graveyard was "the closest I could get to death", Graham says <i>(Image: David Curtis/Millennium Images)</i>

Helen Thomson
New Scientist

Name: Graham
Condition: Cotard's syndrome

"When I was in hospital I kept on telling them that the tablets weren't going to do me any good 'cause my brain was dead. I lost my sense of smell and taste. I didn't need to eat, or speak, or do anything. I ended up spending time in the graveyard because that was the closest I could get to death."

Nine years ago, Graham woke up and discovered he was dead.

He was in the grip of Cotard's syndrome. People with this rare condition believe that they, or parts of their body, no longer exist.

For Graham, it was his brain that was dead, and he believed that he had killed it. Suffering from severe depression, he had tried to commit suicide by taking an electrical appliance with him into the bath.

Eight months later, he told his doctor his brain had died or was, at best, missing. "It's really hard to explain," he says. "I just felt like my brain didn't exist anymore. I kept on telling the doctors that the tablets weren't going to do me any good because I didn't have a brain. I'd fried it in the bath."

Doctors found trying to rationalise with Graham was impossible. Even as he sat there talking, breathing – living – he could not accept that his brain was alive. "I just got annoyed. I didn't know how I could speak or do anything with no brain, but as far as I was concerned I hadn't got one."

Baffled, they eventually put him in touch with neurologists Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter, UK, and Steven Laureys at the University of Liège in Belgium.

"It's the first and only time my secretary has said to me: 'It's really important for you to come and speak to this patient because he's telling me he's dead,'" says Laureys.

Limbo state

"He was a really unusual patient," says Zeman. Graham's belief "was a metaphor for how he felt about the world – his experiences no longer moved him. He felt he was in a limbo state caught between life and death".

No one knows how common Cotard's syndrome may be. A study published in 1995 of 349 elderly psychiatric patients in Hong Kong found two with symptoms resembling Cotard's (General Hospital Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1016/0163-8343(94)00066-M). But with successful and quick treatments for mental states such as depression – the condition from which Cotard's appears to arise most often – readily available, researchers suspect the syndrome is exceptionally rare today. Most academic work on the syndrome is limited to single case studies like Graham.

Some people with Cotard's have reportedly died of starvation, believing they no longer needed to eat. Others have attempted to get rid of their body using acid, which they saw as the only way they could free themselves of being the "walking dead".

Story continues here: newscientist.com

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