A 21-year-old woman who thought she was dead for over a year during high school revealed morbid details of her ordeal in a Reddit AMA this week. “I thought I had been killed by one of my hallucinations, and literally thought I was a ghost,” the woman writing under the username “fishglubber” said in her Reddit post.
The woman says her doctors diagnosed her with schizoaffective disorder, which is characterized by hallucinations, delusions and other symptoms including mania or depression, according to The National Alliance on Mental Illness. The hallucinations she experienced were that of being dead, which can also be characterized as an extremely rare mental condition called Cotard’s Syndrome.
In 1880, neurologist Jules Cotard first described the illness, which he said drives people to think they lost organs, blood or body parts—or believe they lost their souls or are dead altogether. It is unknown how many people in the world suffer from the condition; “Fishglubber” estimates there are fewer than 100, although she didn’t offer evidence backing her claim.
Regardless, it doesn’t appear that “fishglubber” is the only one who has suffered. Doctors were baffled when a man thought he killed his brain after electrocuting himself in a bathtub trying to commit suicide. In another case, a 53-year-old Filipino woman got psychiatric help after she complained to her family that she was dead.
Here’s how “fishglubber” described her episode:
I died when my hallucination killed me. I saw my own body, lying there, dead, in the middle of the store. I looked around. More versions of me, dead, in various ways, everywhere. I saw dead people, and they were all me. It was in that moment that I “realized” that I had been murdered, my body was no more, and I was a ghost. I died in various ways, with my body from various alternate universes being pulled into that store, sometimes poisoned, sometimes stabbed, sometimes shot, sometimes decapitated, but always dead…
You think it’s trippy now, but- the hallucination who killed me was me from the future, who was consumed by her illness and wanted to stop her timeline from occurring, so she killed every version of me from any universe so she would be free.
The woman says that when she was “dead” she would unsuccessfully attempt to walk into walls. She was ashamed to eat or relieve herself because it didn’t make sense that she would still need to. She also recounted hallucinations before and during her “death” episode, which range from having a blue-colored boyfriend who spoke to her in puzzles to seeing a future of herself called “evil!future!me.” She took “evil!future!me” to the prom.
“Fishglubber” has since recovered from the condition and is currently writing an autobiography, which hundreds of Reddit users have encouraged. “I now know why they write ‘Rest in Peace’ on tombstones,” she wrote wrote. “Death, at least how I experienced feelings of it, is far from peaceful at times.”
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