A 28-year-old attempted to murder his neighbor, thinking he was dead and replaced by an impostor. He suffered from a rare psychiatric disorder called “Capgras syndrome”.
- Capgras syndrome was first described in 1923 by Joseph Capgras and Jean Reboul-Lachaux.
- The prevalence of Capgras syndrome in the general population is 0.12% and reaches 1.3% in people with mental illness.
A new case study associates the development of Capgras syndrome with cannabis use.
Last year, a 28-year-old Colombian man was taken to the psychiatric emergency room after he attempted to murder his neighbor, believing he was dead and had been replaced by an impostor. “A patient with no history of mental illness was taken by the police to a psychiatric hospital because of an unsuccessful murder attempt”, indicate the doctors who supported it in the journal Cureus.
Symptoms
After doing several tests, the caregivers concluded that the young man suffered from Capgras syndrome. This rare but serious psychiatric disorder leads one to imagine that the people close to us have been replaced by evil clones. Other symptoms can be added to the paranoid delirium, such as a dissociation of the personality or auditory and visual hallucinations.
The patient thus took himself for a famous musician and explained to anyone who would listen that his grandfather was a terrorist, which was completely false. He slept much less than usual and was also very anxious, thinking that even his own parents had been replaced by threatening beings. “He was a conscious man, but struggling with illogical, delusional and megalomaniac thoughts”note the doctors.
A happy ending
Even more surprisingly for caregivers, this Capgras syndrome has been strongly associated with the patient’s regular consumption of cannabis, whereas it is normally caused by schizophrenia. “Although Capgras syndrome has been reported in nearly 258 people, its relationship with recreational drugs represents an infrequent trigger, described by the existing scientific literature in only seven cases. explain health professionals. “This article therefore aims to report the case of a young man with no history of psychiatric illnesses who began with a psychotic episode associated with Capgras syndrome whose only identifiable origin was cannabis intoxication”, they conclude.
The unusual story of our young Colombian still ends well, since taking two antipsychotics and a mood stabilizer for two months allowed him to come out of his delirium and return to reality, without sequelae. .
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