Treating a brain disease by mutilation of the body is nuts–as nuts as treating a paranoid delusion that your neighbor is an evil alien by shooting your neighbor. Each response provides a solution to the problem–irreversibly trading it for a bigger problem.

We are not defining our own illness. Dr. Michael First, the chief editor of the DSM was the one to start defining Body Integrity Identity Disorder… Dr. First doesn’t have BIID, and I suspect he doesn’t fall in the category of “quack”.

As for “discomfort”. If it was just discomfort, I’d deal with it. But it’s not discomfort. It’s F***ing hell. Passing judgement that this is just something people can put up with is showing no empathy whatsoever, and certainly not seeking to understand the condition before judging us.

Cutting off a healthy limb because of odd thinking in the brain is pure quackery.

So some people have a limb that they don’t feel natural with? Maybe someday a way to remove that subjective discomfort will be found. Until then, it is important to remember that in the end, no matter how intrusive, it is just a subjective discomfort, while physical mutilation is permament and irreversible. Millions manage to live with the opposite problem–lifelong incongruency of missing a limb that their brain tells them should be their. They manage to muddle through. None of us are promised discomfort free lives.