COTARD'S DELUSION [I FEEL FALSE]

Cotard's delusion is formally called Cotard's syndrome or le délire des négations ( the delusion of negation). It was named after French neurologist Jules cotard who documented it in 1880. In this delusion, People are convinced they're dead. Not metaphorically, they believe their flesh is rotting, their organs are gone.Some Patients believe they're dead, some believe they never existed. Some believe they're in hell, condemned to walk around a corpse. You remember from capgras, the emotional recognition pathway severing from the from the visual one.Cotard's is that same mechanism but global.The Emotional aliveness that formally accompanies all sensory experience just shuts off completely.Here is where it gets philosophically suffocating .Many cotard patients believe two things.I'm dead. And I cannot die.It sounds contradictory, but from inside the delusion. If you're already dead, death has no power over you.You're beyond it.One patient said : I've been trying to die for years. But you can't kill a corpse.Several documented cases include patients who tried to verify their death through pain or injury.The disturbing part is that some reported feeling the pain but it didn't change their belief.There is this particular case that I believe has no business being real.A woman in her 50s believed she was dead and specifically that she was decomposing, she could smell her own rotting flesh. She asked to be taken to a morgue.Her family, desperate took her, just to show her she was different from the bodies there.But when they got there, she looked around at the corpses and felt for the first time in months at home.She wasn't disturbed by the bodies, she was comforted, she had found her people. You came into this series through the Truman show delusion - the mind that makes itself the center of everything, the main character, infinitely observed.Cotard's is the exact opposite.Truman show: I am so real that the whole world is organized witnessing me.Cotard's: I am so unreal that I no longer exist at all And capgras sits in-between: the people around me have been hallowed out.Three conditions. Three different ways the brain loses control on the felt reality.First the world feels falseThen the people feel falseThen you feel false Jules cotard, the man who named this spent years documenting patients who believed they were dead while being alive.He died in 1889 during the diphtheria epidemic, nine years after publishing his first case.He caught it from his daughter, who survived.Make of that what you wish.This is the final insight in the series " Falsus - everything and everyone is false including me" Falsus - latin for false The full arc of a mind losing the feeling of reality.Outward, then inward, then gone.If you enjoyed this series and found it interesting I would really appreciate your feedback on the comments section.

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