Cotard Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes And Characteristics
Cotard Syndrome is one of the strangest psychological disorders among other things because of how complicated it is to put yourself in the shoes of someone who experiences it in the first person.
Because the symptoms of this phenomenon are not defined by personality changes, nor by sensory or motor alterations, nor are they rooted in changes to very extreme mood states. Instead, everything is based on a feeling: the feeling of having died.
In this article we will see what Cotard Syndrome is, what its symptoms are, and what its possible causes are, among other things.
It is quite common to think that people interpret reality only from the data that comes to us directly through the senses. According to this point of view, when we see a rectangular body from whose corners four extensions descend, we come to the conclusion that what we are looking at is a table, provided that we have previously learned that concept.
The same would happen with landscapes, people and animals: we would perceive each of these physical elements through our senses and we would automatically identify them in a clean and predictable way, as long as we did not lack data. The truth is that, although most of the time there is a very clear relationship between the raw data that enters us through our senses and what we interpret to be real, this is not always the case. The stranger Cotard syndrome is a sample of it.
Cotard Syndrome is a mental disorder in which the subject perceives itself as something that, in some way, does not exist or is separated from reality.
People with this syndrome are able to sensory perceive their own body (for example, they can see themselves in a mirror, like all people without vision disorders) but they notice it as something strange, as if they did not exist. A significant number of people with Cotard Syndrome, for example, They believe they are dead, literally or figuratively. or be in a state of decomposition. It is not a metaphorical way of saying how they feel, but rather a strong belief, which is taken literally.
This is a psychological phenomenon similar to depersonalization, in which one experiences a disconnection between oneself and everything else. The alteration appears in the way in which what is perceived through the senses is emotionally experienced, not in the way in which the senses provide information. Technically, everything you see, hear, touch, and taste or smell appears to be real, but it does not feel real.
In Cotard Syndrome, this emotional disconnection goes hand in hand with a more specific idea that is a pseudo-explanation for what one feels: oneself is dead, and therefore the person who presents this alteration no longer has a strong interest in continue to be linked to the world.
Symptoms
Although this symptom picture can be called nihilistic deliriumhas nothing to do with the person’s philosophical or attitudinal positioning. Someone with Cotard Syndrome tends to sincerely believe that the plane of reality in which his body is located is not the same one in which his conscious mind is located, and acts accordingly.
What people with Cotard Syndrome experience is very similar to the way in which some people strongly influenced by a specific culture or religion can think about their body, other people and the environment they inhabit; The difference is that people with the syndrome always perceive things this way, regardless of the context, because of a abnormal functioning of some of your brain structures.
Cotard Syndrome gets its name from the French neurologist Jules Cotard, who at the end of the 19th century coined the term Denial Syndrome to describe the case of a woman who believed she was dead and had all her internal organs rotted. This person, believing that she was suspended somewhere between Heaven and Hell, did not believe it was necessary to eat, since the planet Earth had lost all meaning to her.
The concept of derealization implies the idea of ​​perceiving the data that comes to us about the environment as something alien to the reality of those who perceive them. It refers to a psychological phenomenon that appears in certain psychological disorders (not exclusively in Cotard Syndrome), as well as in specific moments that do not constitute an indication of psychopathology.
You can experience something similar, for example, if you are in a dimly lit room and place one of your hands in front of your eyes. You will see the silhouette of one of the parts of your body, which is something that you have already memorized throughout your life, and you will notice that its movements correspond to what you want it to do. However, darkness can mean that, even though all the data you have about the hand corresponds to what you associate with your own body, you have the feeling that the hand is not yours or is dissociated from you in some way.
Something like this is what people with Cotard Syndrome experience: all the sensory information about themselves and the environment seems in order, but despite this the feeling persists that none of it has meaning or is unreal. Furthermore, this delusion is broad enough to be able to take different ways of expressing. Some people believe they are dead, others have the sensation of being immortal, and there are even cases of patients who only perceive some parts of your body as something strange or that it is decomposing.
Cotard Syndrome is complex in its manifestations and its causes, which are found above all in the functioning of the brain. As we have seen, the information processing that coming from the outside and is given from sensory stimuli is correct. What is wrong is the emotional response which this processing should be accompanied by, since everything has no meaning. Therefore, it is believed that the main root of nihilistic delusion is found in the abnormal functioning of the part of the brain associated with the processing of emotions: the limbic system, at the base of the brain.
In this way, Cotard Syndrome would be associated with dissociative type disorders in which there is an abnormal way of feeling certain experiences, not of perceiving them sensorially. This would be an incongruity between what our senses inform us about and the emotional reaction that we can consider “common sense.”
In any case, Cotard Syndrome teaches us that the human brain carries out very complex and varied tasks so that we can comfortably perceive and interpret reality. That this process is automatic and most of the time goes well does not mean that some of these pieces cannot fail, leaving us with eyes, noses and mouths that correctly report about a world without meaning.
