After fainting on a flight to London, Esmé Weijun Wang began to feel broken. Her sense of reality was becoming increasingly fuzzy, and she felt as if she was losing touch with everything around her. In a desperate attempt to try to gain back control of her mind, she read self-help books and began using personal planners, but no amount of organization could put her mind at ease.
On Nov. 5, 2013, Esmé Weijun Wang woke up her husband and announced that she finally understood why she felt so disconnected: she believed was dead. Wang informed her husband that she had actually died on the flight to London, even though she was originally told that she had only fainted, for reasons the doctors couldn't explain.
“I was convinced that I had died on that flight, and I was in the afterlife and hadn’t realized it until that moment,” Wang explained. “That was the beginning of when I was convinced that I was dead. But I wasn’t upset about it, because I thought that I could do things [in my life] over and do them better.”
Wang struggled with this mental illness—known as Cotard's Syndrome—for nearly two months. Cotard's Syndrome, also known as Walking Corpse Syndrome, is a rare mental illness that can cause people to believe that they are dead.Cases of Cotard's Syndrome can be traced back as far as 1788, but Jules Cotard, a French neurologist, was the first one to identify the syndrome in 1880. Similar to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, Cotard's Syndrome is a type of delusional psychosis, and those that suffer from the disorder usually tend to deny their existence, or the existence of certain body parts. In many cases, people will even have the delusion that they are immortal, and will stop eating and drinking as a result, which can eventually lead to death in severe cases.
In Wang's case, she felt as if she had died and was stuck in some type of hell. “I was trying to figure out what I had done wrong, what had condemned me to this afterlife that looked like my real life before I died but wasn’t real—that was the torment of it," she explained after recovery. Wang eventually turned her experience into an essay called "Perdition Days," which she wrote both during and after her struggle with Cotard's Syndrome.
Scientists are still debating over what causes Cotard's Syndrome, but one theory that they have proposed is that many who are affected by this disorder suffer from a malfunction of the fusiform gyrus, an area in the human brain that is meant to recognize faces. This could be accompanied with the malfunction of the amygdala; the set of neurons that is meant to process your emotions. This could likely explain the distorted reality that many with Cotard's experience.
A much more recent case of Cotard's Syndrome is that of Haley Smith, a 17-year-old from Alabama. During an interview, Smith said: "My parents had just divorced and I didn’t cope with it well. Then one day when I was sitting in an English class I had this really weird sensation that I was dead and I couldn’t shake it. As I walked home, I thought about visiting a graveyard, just to be close to others who were also dead."
Smith suffered from this illness for two years before she finally gathered the courage to seek therapy, where she was immediately diagnosed with Cotard's. Smith credits therapy and Disney movies for helping her with her recovery. Smith explained that: "Watching Disney films gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling...The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, Bambi—I watched them all. I asked my boyfriend Jeremy: 'How can I be dead when Disney makes me feel this good?'" Slowly, but surely, Haley Smith began to heal, and now that she's completely herself again, she plans on getting married in the near future.
Similar to depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, Cotard's currently does not have a cure, but can be treated with therapy, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics. It is a terrifying mental illness that many people don't know about, and has only recently come into the public eye. It is crucial that this mental disorder—along with many others—becomes more widely-known, so that we can learn more about it, and possibly find a future cure.
