The People Who Amputate Their Perfectly Healthy Limbs

WE ARE ONLY JUST beginning to understand BIID. It hasn’t helped that the medical establishment has generally dismissed the condition as a perversion. Yet there is evidence that it has existed for hundreds of years. In a recent paper, Peter Brugger, the head of neuropsychology at University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, cites the case of an Englishman who went to France in the late 18th century and asked a surgeon to amputate his leg. When the surgeon refused, the Englishman held him up at gunpoint, forcing him to perform the operation. After returning home, he sent the surgeon 250 guineas and a letter of thanks, in which he wrote that his leg had been “an invincible obstacle” to his happiness.

The first modern account of the condition dates from 1977, when The Journal of Sex Research published a paper on “apotemnophilia” — the desire to be an amputee. The paper categorised the desire for amputation as a paraphilia, a catchall term used for deviant sexual desires. Although it’s true that most people who desire such amputations are sexually attracted to amputees, the term paraphilia has long been a convenient label for misunderstandings: after all, at one time homosexuality was also labelled as paraphilia.

One of the co-authors of the 1977 paper was Gregg Furth, who eventually became a practising psychologist in New York. Furth himself suffered from the condition and, over time, became a major figure in the BIID underground. He wanted to help people deal with their problem, but medical treatment was always controversial — often for good reason. In 1998, Furth introduced a friend to an unlicensed surgeon who agreed to amputate the friend's leg in a Tijuana clinic. The patient died of gangrene and the surgeon was sent to prison. A Scottish surgeon named Robert Smith, who practised at the Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary, briefly held out legal hope for BIID sufferers by openly performing voluntary amputations, but a media frenzy in 2000 led British authorities to forbid such procedures.

The Smith affair fuelled a series of articles about the condition — some suggesting that merely identifying and defining such a condition could cause it to spread, like a virus.

Undeterred, Furth found a surgeon in Asia who was willing to perform amputations for about $6,000. But instead of getting the surgery himself, he began acting as a go-between, putting sufferers in touch with the surgeon. He also contacted Michael First, a clinical psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York. Intrigued, First embarked on a survey of 52 patients. What he found was illuminating. The patients all seemed to be obsessed by the thought of a body that was different in some way from the one they possessed. There seemed to be a mismatch between their internal sense of their own bodies and their physical bodies. First became convinced that he was looking at a disorder of identity, of the sense of self.

“The name that was originally proposed, apotemnophilia, was clearly a problem,” he told me. “We wanted a word that was parallel to gender identity disorder. GID has built into the name a concept that there is a function called gender identity, which is your sense of being male or female, which has gone wrong. So, what would be a parallel notion? Body integrity identity disorder hypothesises that a normal function, which is your comfort in how your body fits together, has gone wrong.”

In June 2003, First presented his findings at a meeting in New York. Robert Smith, Furth, and many BIID sufferers attended the meeting. One of them was David’s gatekeeper, whom I’ll call Patrick. Without much warning, Furth walked up to Patrick with a startling proposition. “We are standing there eating our sandwich, and he says to me, ‘Would you be interested in a surgical option?’” Patrick, who has felt the pressure of BIID for most of his life, told me. He didn’t have any reservations. “Hell yes. Yes, yes, yes, no question about it.” To this day, Patrick doesn’t know why Furth singled him out. Patrick is not a religious man, but he felt a higher power was giving him his due.

The next evening, Patrick and his wife went over to Furth’s apartment for an evaluation. Furth grilled Patrick to make sure he was for real. Was Patrick’s desire due to BIID or a sexual fetish? How did it impact his life? For two hours the questions flowed. Patrick answered them, scared that he’d “flunk the evaluation.” He didn’t, and Furth agreed to make the recommendation. That was where it all began. Just a few months later, he had the surgery he craved. And less than a year after that, Patrick had become the gatekeeper himself.

Sitting at home in a small, run-down American town not too far from the ocean, Patrick recalled the day his wife found out about his obsession. It was during the mid-‘90s. As with almost all BIID sufferers, Patrick was fascinated with amputees, so he began downloading pictures of them off the Internet and printing them out. One day his wife was sitting in front of their computer, while Patrick sat in a wingback chair. She noticed a pile of printouts. They were images of men, but “completely clothed, no nudes or anything like that.” It was an awkward moment. “She was thinking that maybe I was gay,” Patrick recalls. “I must have been crimson.” Patrick asked her to take a closer look. She did, and soon realised that the men were all amputees.

Patrick told his wife that he had felt odd about his leg since he was four years old, a feeling that eventually grew into an all-consuming desire to be rid of it. It was a shock: they had been married for decades, and the revelation that he had been hiding something for years was hard to take. But his confession also brought relief. For more than four decades he had suffered alone. Growing up in small-town America, with conservative parents, in an era when “people didn’t believe in going and seeing mental health professionals,” Patrick was mystified by what he felt. By the early ‘60s, as a teenager, his obsession with amputees and amputations took him to a library in the nearby state capital, where he hoped to find books on the subject. To his surprise, most of the pictures of amputees had been stolen. At that moment he realised that he wasn’t the only person who was consumed by this strange obsession.

“There had to be somebody else out there,” Patrick told me, “but how could I find out who?”

As time went on, Patrick struggled with his thoughts about his leg: “How can I get rid of it? What can I do? How can I do it? I don’t want to die in the process.” Seeing a picture of an amputee, or worse, seeing an amputee on the streets, would ratchet up his emotions. “It would just drive me nuts,” he told me. “That could last for several days. All I could think about was how I could get rid of my leg.” His anxiety led him to make deals with God and pacts with the devil: “Take my leg, save somebody else’s,” he implored. Yet through it all, for the first four and a half decades of his life, he told no one. The loneliness was almost too much to bear.

Less than a year before his wife’s discovery, he had stumbled upon an anonymous classified ad in a local city newsletter. The person who placed it admitted a desire to amputate a limb; he was a wannabe. Patrick wrote to the post office box that was listed and began a correspondence with the man. Eventually they met, and the man told him about others who were seeking amputations. It was a deliverance. “Oh my God, I’m not alone with this anymore,” Patrick recalled thinking. “I’m not nuts.”

Yet finding others who shared his condition did not lessen his need. If anything, Patrick’s desperation grew. He considered a DIY amputation. He had heard of people who had lain down on train tracks and let a train run over their limbs, or who had blown their legs off with a shotgun. “The trouble with a train is that if the train is moving at a good clip, you can kill yourself very easily, because it can pick you up and spit you out,” he said. “I really didn’t want to die in the process and not find out what it was like to live with one leg.”

Another wannabe who had done a DIY amputation suggested Patrick practise first, so Patrick decided to get rid of part of his finger as a prelude to amputating his leg. With a pen and a rubber band, he made a tourniquet for one of his fingers and stuck it into a thermal cup full of ice and alcohol. After part of the finger became numb and Patrick was unable to bend it, he took a hammer and chisel and chopped off the bit above the first knuckle. He even smashed the detached digit. “So they couldn’t reattach it even if they wanted to,” Patrick told me.

Crushing the amputated digit also aided in the cover-up: hospital staff were told that a heavy object had fallen on the finger. When a doctor injected his injured finger with a painkiller, Patrick pretended that the needle hurt. His finger was still numb.

It was eight years ago that Patrick finally made it to Asia to see the surgeon Gregg Furth introduced him to. He was admitted to hospital on a Friday evening, and had to wait until Saturday evening to be wheeled into surgery. “The single longest day of my life,” he told me. He awoke from his anaesthesia the next day. “I looked down and couldn’t believe it. It was finally gone,” he said. “I was ecstatic.” His only regret in the eight years since his amputation is that he didn’t get it when he was younger. “I wouldn’t want my leg back for all the money in the world, that’s how happy I am.”

A YEAR OR SO before Patrick's operation, a psychologist asked him if he would take a pill to make his BIID go away, should such a treatment exist. It took a moment for him to reflect and answer: maybe when he had been a lot younger, but not anymore. “This has become the core of who and what I am,” he said.

"This is who I am." Everyone with BIID that I have interviewed or heard about uses some variation on those words to describe their condition. When they envision themselves whole and complete, that image does not include parts of their limbs. “It seems like my body stops mid-thigh of my right leg,” Furth told the makers of a 2000 BBC documentary, Complete Obsession. “The rest is not me.”

The debate rages on over whether amputation is ethical. In the meantime, BIID sufferers often take treatment into their own hands. Visceral negative reactions are common when people first hear about voluntary amputations. Twelve years ago, when media attention to the condition was at its height, bioethicist Arthur Caplan, then of the University of Pennsylvania, called it “absolute, utter lunacy to go along with a request to maim somebody.”

More than a decade later, there is still argument in the pages of academic journals about the ethics of voluntary amputations. Is it analogous to other body-modifying cosmetic surgeries, such as breast reduction? Some bioethicists say no, since amputation entails a permanent disability. Others point out that cosmetic surgery can also be disabling, as when breast reduction results in the inability to breastfeed. Or should BIID be compared to anorexia nervosa as the best, if somewhat imperfect, analogy, because both involve body-image discrepancies? According to this line of argument, amputations should be denied just as anorexics are sometimes fed against their will. The retort to this is that anorexics are clearly delusional about their bodies, as objective measures can show their body weight to be dangerously low. There is no such objective measure of a BIID patient’s internal feeling of bodily mismatch.

[quote]DO NOT re-post entire or large excerpts of articles from other sites. Just provide a link and maybe a few selected quotes.

^^That’s from the DL faq. You should read it. I’ve noticed a huge increase of this infraction in the past week. The link will suffice, thank you.

This is horrifying. The guy hated his leg since he was four? I wonder if that's really true or just ex post rewriting of his childhood to justify/validate the clearly psycho feelings he's allowing himself to be obsessed with today.

tl;dr

Freak.

OK - I finally found your link in R5, OP. Good grief, did the assisted living facility just get the internet or what? I need to hook you up with BILL TAYLOR.

And I just noticed the article is from1999 - dear God.

There’s a great (strange, neo-noir, coming of age) movie called Quid Pro Quo with Nick Stahl and Vera Farmiga which is about a slightly different facet of BIID.

Frightened women with a family history of breast cancer are chopping off their cancer-free breasts now. Doctors will do anything for a buck.

I don't understand why they can't get their amputations if they want them. We cut healthy body parts off trannies and don't shame them, this is essentially the same thing.

this is fine

Seems like a grand form of cutting and a Cluster B PD.

This thread is literal violence against those violently assigned bipedal at birth

I feel sorry for people with these disorders because its some kind of neuro or psych condition, but comparing a guy obsessed with his leg to trans people is a false equivalency, because gender is a whole identity issue on top of that. In some cases, you’d have to amputate a T brain and replace with one wired for a dick or vagina, so I guess doctors mitigate this with hormones and surgeries.

Also, why not just post a thread title about trans people getting body parts removed instead of nesting it under the auspices of “mentally ill guy wants to chop of leg?” I had to sludge through a bunch of irrelevant stuff and uncited excerpts from articles before the topic became clear. It’s like having to read through a bad middle school paper.

I had a friend who lost two fingers in an automobile accident. He said that he occasionally met people who seemed obsessed with his missing fingers and were quite inquisitive about them, to a creepy degree. He found it disturbing.

R19 I know someone obsessed with teeth, which reminds me of another disorder where people are obsessed and terrified by their pores. Then there is Morgellons - the disorder Joni Mitchell has, where she sees fibers growing out of her skin and refuses to believe its all in her mind..

Not to mention “illnesses” like chronic fatigue, lyme disease,and fibromyalgia, that have no visible presence or “cure,” so patients are treated with placebos as a pallative measure. Very strange!

Marry me r17

Woops - I meant CHRONIC lyme disease, which is fake, not regular lyme disease, which is real.

A much better and less credulous article about this phenomenon.

Cut off their heads, that's where the problem is

Here’s a more recent article - it has to do with to “reduced activity in a brain area involved in forming a mental body map.”

This makes sense! Many American women have the “mental body maps” of manatees, for instance.

R6, for years the custom was to post the entire article. The FAQ change happened a few years ago without any notice, and there are still a lot of regulars who don't realize we're not supposed to do it. In fact, somebody keeps changing the wording in the FAQ and yet never tells people to read it, and doesn't even make it that easy to get to.

[Quote]I don't understand why they can't get their amputations if they want them

For one thing, later on in life they'll be a much bigger drag on the healthcare and senior care systems than they'd otherwise be. Also these assholes will be the first to request handicap parking permits, etc.... taking away spots from the legitimately disabled.

Right r27, as will aging trans as they are diagnosed with afflictions from taking years of cross hormones and trying to suppress natural body functions, not to mention gynos having to retrain to treat women with penises. They are both equally dangerous and ridiculous and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

[quote]I feel sorry for people with these disorders because its some kind of neuro or psych condition, but comparing a guy obsessed with his leg to trans people is a false equivalency, because gender is a whole identity issue on top of that. In some cases, you’d have to amputate a T brain and replace with one wired for a dick or vagina, so I guess doctors mitigate this with hormones and surgeries.

r18, can you explain how this a is a false equivalency? All of these people (trans, anorexics, wannabe amputees, etc.) suffer from delusions where they obsess over their physical body not matching their mental 'body', this causes great mental distress.

Also, can you please explain your comment that 'gender is a whole identity'? And can you do it without referring to any gender stereotypes?

This sounds alot like body dysmorphia, the disorder Michael Jackson had. He pretty much amputated his nose because he hated it.

Schizo.

Another thing about people with body dysmorphia is they add parts too, while the amputee fetish people don’t. Same goes for the opposite of anorexia - obesity, Instead of continual starving, it’s continual fattening.

Funny thing is that there are way more obese people than all the disorders mentioned above combined, yet wanting to dress yourself in a giant meat suit is not considered to be a mental illness?

Yeah but obese people don't strive to be obese. Obesity would be the opposite psychologically.

(quote]it hasn’t helped that the medical establishment has generally dismissed the condition as a perversion. Yet there is evidence that it has existed for hundreds of years.

Plenty of perversions have existed for "hundreds of years" 🙄 it don't make them any more legitimate. Mental illness that makes people desperate to mutilate themselves is still mental illness. I read about a schizophrenic woman who, back in the 1800s, thought she heard voices from inside her teeth. Nowadays a schizo would think they had government radio or microchip implants, or alien technology spying on them and trying to control them. Back a few hundred years ago they thought it was the Devil or evil spirits. Anyway, that woman found a crooked dentist who agreed to pull all her teeth out for a bag of money, and her furious husband found out and beat the shit out of the dentist. Because, it didn't make her any better and now she struggled to eat.

OP's article also trots out the old "well we used to call homosexuality a disorder too" line. Last I checked, homosexual behavior has been observed to be relatively common in hundreds of mammal species, it hurts no one, and it doesn't put any expensive burden on society/taxpayers to accommodate surgeries, amputations, wheelchairs, synthetic medications, etc.

Oh! I need a new hobby!

What's the problem, human?

It seems very similar to delusional disorder, which is a psychotic condition, where the delusional thinking is limited to a very narrow scope. It's not all-encompassing like schizophrenia. A person with delusional disorder seems completely normal when you can distract them from their "hot topic".

The thing with delusional disorder: it never goes a way. It just changes. Let's say that a man is convinced that his wife is cheating on him. Cheating with her friends, coworkers, strangers, both their relatives. He becomes obsessed with proving it. She's never cheated, she passes a lie detector test, but the husband denounces the results. He says that perhaps the woman is secretly sleeping with the person who administered the test. Eventually he divorces his wife. It would seem that the problem was over. But three years later he gets married, and the cycle repeats itself.

If someone is obsessed with the fact that they have a bad limb, and they manage to have it removed...then won't they eventually determine that another one of their limbs is bad? And the cycle will repeat. This condition probably affects an extremely small number of people. I wonder if they would respond well with Respiridol or Abilify, which are used to treat psychotic disorders.

According to the wikipedia page, people with this condition are calling themselves "transabled".

Kinda makes circumcision a non-starter, doesn't it.

No they better fucking not R38

No they really do r40, I followed their transabled page years ago after reading about BIID. They are fucking fascinating, and they are exactly like trannies.

Fuck that.

Disability is not romantic or magical or any fucking thing to aspire to.

I don't consider my penis a limb, OP.

I still have it.

R39 I don't follow.

OP posting style is just as asinine as the freaks in the article.

By the way, I adore A Zed and 2 Noughts.

Don’t they enjoy dancing?

It only took until r14 to compare to the Ts.

My first thought when I saw the headline was that this was a stealth T thread, so was wondering how long before someone drew the line between various dysmophic conditions, mental illness, and the Ts.

The DL is the only place that expends as much mental energy on the Ts as the Ts themselves.

And yet you brought it back around to the Ts

Yep r48. And why wouldn't we draw a comparison r47? How is it not the same thing as the trannies? Why is one lauded and celebrated and one shunned?

I'm so dog tired of weirdos.

[quote]It only took until [R14] to compare to the Ts. My first thought when I saw the headline was that this was a stealth T thread, so was wondering how long before someone drew the line between various dysmophic conditions, mental illness, and the Ts. The DL is the only place that expends as much mental energy on the Ts as the Ts themselves.

r47, what do you consider the essential difference between body dysphoria that compels one to remove a limb and body dysphoria that compels one to remove one's genitals?

They do consider themselves skin to transgender people.

Do yourselves a favor and check out the #transabled hashtag on Tumblr. It's hillarious.

T pioneers and their supportive doctors

You would think that if there were any place that would be not so judgmental it would be here. Most people don't choose their compulsions. Mine began with shaving my head in college. It became a compulsion. In my 30's, I found that that was not enough and needed to find a dentist who would excise my otherwise serviceable teeth. With the internet, and for a price, that was not too much of challenge. I am fascinated with having an amputated limb but I am still a bit "shy" about pursuing it to its climax. It would probably be done overseas and it is not easy to afford enough rehab so as to return to the States within a reasonable time. I envy those who just happen to have an amputation due to an accident and wonder whether it may not have been such an accident. I do not consider myself weird.,

Why would "here" not be judgmental about compulsions though r55? Do you think being gay is a mental illness? Because having your teeth pulled most definitely is and it's sad but it's not the same as being gay.

This is the only mental illness I have no sympathy with.

@R53's link..

[quote] If these bigoted and horrible people want a war then they’ll get one. Cringe culture is dead and the kinnies will be the ones to make sure it stays dead. I’m getting hate because I have different views on the world compared to everyone else. I’m getting hate because i’m 13, in a polyamorous relationship, i’m an ace panromantic, I’m a furry, I’m plantkin, I’m polykin, my pronouns are bioshe/bioher and she/her, i’m biogender, I’m aestheticgender and I’m self-diagnosed. I’m getting hate for all of this. Just because I’m different doesn’t mean I’m your punching bag.

R20 fibromyalgia exists, it can be seen in MRI scans. It’s a problem with nerve endings.

[quote] I envy those who just happen to have an amputation due to an accident and wonder whether it may not have been such an accident. I do not consider myself weird.,

But ya are, Blanche, ya [italic]are.[/italic]

R12 I mean I certainly wouldn't give up life or limb to fuck Nick Stahl, but there are things I would do. He's fine.

From link @ R53 "As a variation of plantkin, my kintype uses photosynthesis. I unfortunately don’t go outside much, due to me being transabled, so I haven’t been able to go outside much until now. I’ve got a new and improved wheel chair that I can go outside with easier and I’ve been feeling closer to my kintype. "

Imagine for a moment dear reader, that this is your child. Not only are they a plant, they're a transabled plant who can't even photosynthesize properly.

They're failing at being a PLANT! You done even have to MOVE FFS!

I wonder if the person....sorry, “plantkin,”....quoted by R62 ever tried to have someone pay their way to MichFest.

Squirrels, death r63

I too was the oddball virgin nerdy loser amoeba with no friends in my JH/HS class and even I would be shoving Cactussa into her(?) locker. Or just shaking her violently asking "this what you want for your mind? for your life? you want it to be like this?". Those so-called 'hate' asks she cites were likely just trying to nudge her in the direction of help. 'Bigoted'? 'Privileged ableists'? 'Cisro truscum'? No, these people are the only ones who cared enough to challenge these boneheaded 13y.o. assumptions (which btw are based on very limited experience).

I get it. Life in the perceived-Now is fucking unbearably dumb (or whatever so-called reality it is we're existing in) and full of fearmongering, with shrinks & doctors trying to manipulate and poison any kid into whom they can sink their claws. All this new generation has is to look up is Jaden Smith. But 13 is too soon to just call it a day on a body & mind. Even Romeo & Juliet were a few years older. Hell, 23 is a little early. At least get to your 27th birthday as tradition demands, and swallow a dime bag full of Somas while driving toward a cliff-face or something else extra and suitably dramatic first if you insist on throwing in the towel on life like this.

I'm really starting to think that all that these people need is a good, hard slap in the face.

"I can't load the dishwasher mom, I'm plantkin and..." *SLAP!*

"I don't feel right with two working legs..." *SLAP*

Problem solved.

Also really, really certain at this point that children shouldn't be allowed to use the internet. Blanket ban for anyone under 18. Death penalty for parents who allow it.

[quote]I’m getting hate because i’m 13, in a polyamorous relationship

This girl was probably abused as a younger child. All the "I'm polyamorous, I'm asexual, I'm a furry, I'm trans abled, I'm part plant" in someone so young just sounds to me like a troubled and very confused mind crying out for help. She clearly doesn't know how to sort out or handle her own feelings, she just knows she feels *different* from her peers and is clearly uncomfortable in her own developing body.

In my day, I sought respite in music (David Bowie, Pulp, Queen, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, etc) that helped me not to feel so alone in my otherness and helped me become okay with ambiguity and being something of an outsider. Books also helped. I think I agree with r67.

Really r68? to me it just sounds like someone wanting to be special, I mean, she has like 4 more labels than Talon, who only has 7. It's a fucking contest in the victim olympics. I remember when we used to try to act like we had our shit together because no one wants to be labelled as an unfuckable weirdo, now people upload videos of themselves crying and blast it all over social media that they are being literal violenced because people don't want to stick their dicks in them.