Jewel Shuping was born with perfectly healthy eyes, but she told Barcroft TV in a recent interview that growing up there was always something missing. However over the next six months, the chemicals produced the desired result as her left eye suffered a corneal meltdown and had to be removed.
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After many years, Jewel Shuping, a 30-year-old from North Carolina, has managed to fulfill her lifelong dream. “I laid down on the sofa, and he sat next to me, dropped two drops into each eye”, she says matter-of-factly. Ms Shuping admitted the process was extremely painful.
“By the time I was six I remember that thinking about being blind made me feel comfortable”, she says. “And they need professional help.” said Dr. Michael First, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in New York and original coiner of the condition.
However, while she is happier living as a blind person, she doesn’t recommend what she went through.
“I was “blind-simming””, which is pretending to be blind, but the idea kept coming up in my head and by the time I was 21 it was a non-stop alarm that was going off, she told Barcroft. Later in life she began wearing thick glasses, carrying a cane and became fluent in reading braille – all despite her perfectly fine vision. Her desire to go blind started at age 6.
She said: “My mother would find me walking in the halls at night, when I was three or four years old”.
She was taken to the hospital against her wish and doctors tried to save her eyesight. “And every time I do something, it feels right, like this is how it should’ve been since I was born”.
Finally, by 2006, she found a “sympathetic” psychologist who actually agreed to aid her in pouring the drain cleaner into her eyes.
More often associated with the desire to amputate or paralyze yourself (the former condition also referred to as xenomelia), BIID isn’t officially recognized as a disorder by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), though it is acknowledged. “If you feel that you have to, at least talk to a psychiatrist – try to get somebody who knows what they’re doing to help you”. I feel bad for people whore blind and arent happy, but this is what I want.
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Body Integrity Identity Disorder is when a person’s idea of how they should look does not match their physical form. ‘This is not a choice, it’s a need based on a disorder of the brain’.
