Skip to main content

Imposters: a story about a Capgras delusion

 



It's cold. I'm always so cold. My hands quiver blue and wrists bloom purple, after days of bang, bang, banging my wrist on the arm of my chair. I don't think I'm okay, but I don't think I'm not okay either. I think, I think, I think I'm breaking. I am on the children's ward. I have not seen my real parents for months. Some strange people visit sometimes. I hide from them. They are not my parents. They are often nice and I begin to trust them, then they'll do something off-kilter and I shy away again, like a beaten dog. 

I had climbed out of a window, bawled through the lane outside the house and taken solace at a friend's home up the road. Gently I was led back to my childhood home and bundled into the car, driven to the hospital and admitted in hopes of finding a way to avoid another inpatient admission. We couldn't find one. 

I arrive at the unit, brittle. Last time I was in this position, I had a home, but now I'm adrift. My parents are gone, or at least they are to me. 

I have a Capgras delusion, but I won't find that out until I'm being discharged from the unit nearly six months later. 

A Capgras delusion is where you think that a close friend or a family member has been replaced by an identical-looking imposter. For me, it was my parents that were being imitated and they were up to no good. I believed they meant me harm. I had no idea that they were actually just my parents, who must have been hurting so inconceivably to see their child so ill. 

I want to thank my parents for coming to see me every weekend, even though I had no idea who they were. I want to thank my parents for their unshakable faith in me and for seeing that I could get better. 

This post is short because first-person is painful - I can't believe it was me. 

I wish it hadn't been. I take solace in the fact that this type of delusion is rare, so not many others are rendered so helpless, running from those that love them most. 

Thank you for reading. 




Comments

  1. Unknown10 October 2021 at 02:17

    Be careful with this dynamite, dear Lupin!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. L10 October 2021 at 11:03

      Dynamite? As in it’s triggering? I’m so sorry!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not-Dinner-Party-Appropriate: anecdotes from the mental hospital

 I feel like a time traveller. I've awoken in 2021, sleeping through a pandemic and my teenage years, now in my mid-twenties. I have no dinner-party-appropriate anecdotes. Only mental ill-health with bouts of questionable wellness. I have been in four different mental hospitals, which I predict could be four more than most people. No one talks about it, including me. Like, at all.  Whenever someone talks about mental illness, there is this most impenetrable silence, followed by: 'I knew someone who was depressed once.' Or a casual, almost nonchalant change of subject. I mean, we talk about mental health a lot - how to keep it afloat, how to do 'self-care' in a commercially-assisted sense. It's all body butters and face masks.  I don't like it when people reduce preventing mental illness down to looking after yourself or not. That is a large part of it, a whole team of people looked after me at my worst. Most things cannot be made better with a face mask.  It
3 comments
Read more

Section three - a mental hospital anecdote

  There is so much that I can't tell you about my third admission, so much I can't remember. Illness blurs the details and the privacy I owe to my friends erases the daily minutiae of the unit. In short, I had been sectioned - section three, six months. A treatment order, that in retrospect, could probably have been avoided. Or maybe that is just what I like to tell myself when I think about it late at night.  I had found myself in a field, shivering in the early evening sun. It was July, I was in love, but still very, very ill. I had been taken on four occasions to our local accident and emergency department that week. I was, as I read later in my unit-admission report, 'no longer manageable in the community'. I was sad, but determined. I was determined to make an exit any way I could. Instead I was flown to Woking, heavily sedated - so much so that I have no memory of the journey there and was deemed 'unresponsive' in my admission interview.  I digress. So man
Post a Comment
Read more