The Complete Idiot's Guide to Werewolves (38 page)

 

In the fourth week of Mrs. L’s treatment, the antipsychotic drugs seemed to take effect. Mrs. L reported during therapy sessions that the wolf eye was no longer present when she looked in the mirror.

 

On the night of the full moon, Mrs. L did experience one very brief relapse. She was asked to write down her experience. In one very interesting passage from her writings, which hints of similarities to the case of Mr. W, Mrs. L proclaimed, “I will haunt the graveyards for a tall, dark man that I intend to find.”

 

After nine weeks, Mrs. L was finally discharged to outpatient status, continuing her treatment of antipsychotic drugs.

In 2000, the
Canadian Journal of Psychiatry
published another clinical lycanthropy case study in an article that was collaboratively written by Drs. J. Arturo Silva, M.D., Dennis Derecho, M.P.H., and Gregory Leong, M.D. In this case, the patient is referred to by the pseudonym “Mr. A.”

 

According to the case study, at the time of his diagnosis and treatment, Mr. A was 46 years old. He was admitted for care due to a series of hours-long delusional episodes in which he believed that he could feel and see hair growing all over his body or in specific places (usually his face and arms). During some episodes, Mr. A was able to recognize that despite the sensation, what he was experiencing was not real. Other times, however, he was overcome by this delusion to such a degree that he accepted it as reality.

 

In addition to his delusions regarding hair growth, Mr. A would also experience delusions in which he believed that his face would deform and that lesions were appearing on his skin. He claimed that these disfigurements would happen in seconds and last for several hours.

 

What makes this case interesting is that Mr. A claimed that his delusions made him
look
like a wolf. Whenever these hair growth and face disfigurement delusions occurred, Mr. A would look in the mirror and believe that he looked somewhat like a wolf. However, what makes his case different is that Mr. A also verbally stated that he did not believe he
was
a wolf. He also did not exhibit the delusion that his mind was under the influence of some evil force, as is common in cases of clinical lycanthropy.

 

Mr. A was eventually diagnosed with an unspecified psychotic disorder. He was treated with antipsychotic drugs and eventually released for outpatient treatment.

In April 2004, a clinical lycanthropy case study, entitled “Lycanthropy in Depression,” was published in the
Archives of Iranian Medicine
. This case was recorded and documented by Dr. Ali-Reza Moghaddas, M.D., and Dr. Mitra Nasseri, M.D. This particular case occurred in the Middle Eastern region of Tehran, Iran.

 

The patient in this case was a 20-year-old male from a lower class family in the suburban Kazeroon region. The young man in question is left unidentified in the article (and not given a pseudonym). He had exhibited a serious stuttering problem since the age of 12 and for years had suffered with bouts of depression. He was admitted for psychiatric treatment when he verbalized complaints of having turned into a wolf. The young man claimed that, during these transformations, he gained superhuman strength. On several occasions, he had even gone so far as to attack and bite other people (sometimes even removing chunks of flesh and swallowing them).

The triggers for his delusions were sometimes psychological or emotional. He reported that they would manifest at times when he was experiencing extreme anxiety, loneliness, or fear. Other times, they occurred at particular times, such as in the early morning hours and at night. These experiences would last as long as three hours, and he would recover from them as one would from unconsciousness. The patient reported that he felt disoriented, afraid, and light-headed after these episodes, and often suffered from headaches for hours.

 

There is one rather interesting and unique delusional element to this case. The patient reported that at times he would experience delusions that the people around him, even friends and family, had transformed into wolves or other animals. In these situations, he would feel overcome by paranoid anxiety, believing that they were going to attack and even try to kill him. Afraid that he might harm someone, the patient would then run from people and confine himself in an isolated space until the experience passed.

 

The patient also experienced hallucinatory symptoms in addition to clinical lycanthropy. For example, he would sometimes suffer from delusions that insects were crawling all over his skin, or even inside of his body. He would hear sounds that were not there, and complain of smells that no one else could detect. Often, he would wake and complain of ghostly visions during his sleep.

 

CT scans and other tests were conducted, and it was concluded that the patient did not suffer from any neurological defects. An IQ test revealed that he had somewhat lower than average intelligence. In the end, the causal diagnosis for his lycanthropy symptoms was identified as extreme and delusional depression. He was treated with both antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs. Over a period of two years, the patient’s symptoms of lycanthropy and other hallucinations began to decrease. He eventually made a full recovery.

This particular case also comes out of Iran. The case study was recorded and documented by Dr. Toofani and Dr. Ali-Reza Nejad of Beheshti Hospital, and was published in July 2004 issue of the
Acta Psychiatrica Scandanavia
. This case deals with an integration of clinical lycanthropy with the symptomatic condition called Cotard’s Syndrome. Cotard’s is a rare symptomatic condition in which the person suffers from
nihilistic
delusions of immortality. Cotard’s patients are often under delusions that they are physically dead but still animated—basically, that they are “undead.”

The patient in this case was a 32-year-old male from the southern Iranian city of Kerman. He was married with three daughters. He was also poorly educated, having dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He was referred for psychiatric treatment by his family after refusing to go to work for nearly two weeks. His symptoms, however, had increased gradually over a period of roughly two years. In the last two weeks, they had reached an extreme level and began to interfere with his work and daily life.

 

During his initial evaluation, he explained that no one paid any attention to him and that people avoided him. The reason for this, he claimed, was because he was dead, but alive. He went on to explain that he had once experienced a sensation like an electric shock, and ever since then had felt that his body had been transformed into something that was dead but still moving. He insisted that he was no longer human, and told doctors “I speak, breathe, and eat, but I am dead.”

 

When asked what he thought had caused him to become this way, the patient claimed that he believed this was punishment for living a sinful life. Basically, he claimed that he was being punished by God. He claimed that God had cursed him with a dead immortality, and would not allow him to be killed. He then voiced a paranoid delusion that many of his friends and family members had already tried to poison him by putting cyanide in his tea, but because of his divine curse/ protection he did not die. He also claimed that his wife and three daughters were also dead and immortal as he was.

 

When asked about his delusions of lycanthropy, he voiced a belief that both he and his wife were sometimes transformed into dogs. His daughters, he said, were transformed into sheep. He claimed to have discovered this when he realized that his daughters’ urine smelled like sheep urine (which leads one to wonder why in the world he was sniffing urine).

 

The man also expressed a fear that he might be overcome by sexual urges. He suffered from insomnia because of this, and slept in a room that was separated from his wife and daughters because he feared that he might (involuntarily) sexually assault any of them if he did not.

 

Tests ruled out any neurological defects, and he was found to be of average to slightly above average intelligence. The patient was treated with antipsychotic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy for two weeks. After this treatment, all delusional and hallucinatory symptoms had subsided.

Reverse clinical lycanthropy is a rare but related symptomatic condition in which the patient suffers from the delusion that he or she has the power to transform others into wolves (and sometimes into other animals). One recent case of this, also out of Iran, was reported in a case study by Dr. Ali-Reza Nejad. The patient was an 18-year-old male suffering from delusional episodes and bipolar disorder. He was unmarried and without children. He was also poorly educated, having dropped out of school in the tenth grade, and from a poor, lower class background.

 

After a physically traumatic experience in which he was badly burned across his legs and backside with boiling water, the patient began to feel that he had somehow been changed. He began to voice delusions that he had transformed his own mother into a wolf on several occasions. No amount of reasoning from his mother could convince the young man of anything to the contrary.

 

When asked what he thought had caused him to become this way, the patient explained that he believed he was cursed by Shahe Parian, the “King of the
Jinn
” in Arabic mythology. When asked to elaborate about this, he claimed that he had somehow injured the King Jinn’s daughter when he’d accidentally burned himself with boiling water. Because he had done this, the patient claimed, the King Jinn was taking revenge on him by giving him a power that he could not control—basically, by giving him a power that caused him to accidentally transform his beloved mother into a wolf.