I have a friend who claims to be infected with Morgellan syndrome which she constantly researches by bringing up scary pictures on the Internet of people with big oozing sores and other images that are a cross between Midnight Meat Train and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Morgellan sufferers commiserate in their shared suffering namely stemming from the fact that the medical community fails to give adequate credence to their claims of infection. My friend cites this as evidence of an underground government conspiracy and suggests that the disease may be the result of shady government bioterrorists wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting public. For this reason, I dismiss her as a hypochondriac drama queen especially since she tried to convince me I had the disease after I was scratched on my wrist somehow but didn’t remember actually getting scratched. She cited this as possible Morgellan’s and warned me that several of her friends have it whose lives have been ruined.
She constantly picks at patches of dead skin on her face with tweezers claiming what looks like eszema or dermatitis is Morgellans but never gives credence to the suggestion that she be antagonizing whatever it is by constantly picking at with a sharp pointy object. My question to the community is does this resonate with anybody? Have others heard of this malady? Surely there must be a way to explain the scads of scary photos found online but how much of it is fact and how much is bullshit? Thoughts???
Yes, your friend is crazy (perhaps somewhat severely). There is no such thing as “Morgellon’s.” There is such a thing as somatoform disorders (once known as hysteria).
It’s not really controversial anymore: Morgellons is a fake disease created by sufferers to explain their delusional parasitosis. It commonly ties into other conspiracy theories, like chemtrails, in a big ugly gumbo of nonsense and delusion.
Those government bioterrorists are pretty darn sneaky, but think how much worse it could be if they were actually freelance bioterrorists, or even enemy bioterrorists!
Previous thread on this topic (the OP being the sufferer) - unfortunately, many of the photo links in the thread are dead now, but they consisted of quite ordinary skin flakes, bits of thread (probably from clothing), etc. The OP was convinced they were eggs, worms, etc.
I have seen it once, at work. In that situation, it was a side effect of an amphetamine the patient was taking - once they went off of it, they were fine.
“Delusional parasitosis” is an unfortunate moniker for this condition, because it enables people to marginalize it as imaginary or falsified. Just because it’s a psychosomatic condition doesn’t mean that suffering is being faked. No, there aren’t really bugs on their skin. But the symptoms of itching and paranoia are very real to the person experiencing them. It’s like fibromyalgia. There’s no physiological cause for the pain, but there may be a psychological cause for it. Regardless, the person is still experiencing real pain.
FWIW, I do not suffer from delusional parasitosis, fibromyalgia, or any other psychosomatic illness.
But it can be very hard to get the sufferer to take the anti-psychotic meds, or engage in cognitive therapy to deal with their disease. They usually have a LOT invested in not ‘being crazy’.
So your diagnosis is that michaeltangelo’s friend is nutsy coo-coo. Got it, Doc!
Note for those new here: Jackmannii is, by trade, an epidemiologist (right?) and is knowledgeable about many things medical and psychological so I trust his judgement. I, on the other hand, am, despite my meds, still a bit nutsy coo-coo. And a wiseass.
I often wonder how much of it is psychosomatic, and how much of it could be B12 deficiency. I’ve had to deal with that, and it gave me some loss of feeling in my skin. When this is going on, you sometimes feel something crawling on you, but it turns out not to be there. It really wouldn’t take much to go from that to assuming there really was something there, if I didn’t know better.
This is what I’ve suspected all along. Did I mention that she’s a regular crack smoker? I thought her issue mirrored typical amphetamine psychosis but I am so conditioned to her lack of acknowledgment about that as a possible contributing factor but I should have known. I have seen behavior like this before among incessant crack and speed users but this was the first time I had heard it labeled as Morgellan’s. She often diagnoses it in other people and warns them about the lack of available treatment. I guess there are online support groups but I’ll continue to humor her while privately dismissing them as whackos. Thanks for confirming what I knew already in my gut.:rolleyes:
And WHY will you continue to be in the same room w/ a crack smoker who’s picking at their face w/ tweezers? It sounds exhausting since she will not listen to you but will argue against you and also, I sense she may not be so fresh smelling.
