That is, of course, clear mental illness, and it cuts deep that you bring it up, since a mentally ill family member once went to a hospital and demanded exactly that.
Try to be more level headed here. There are few medical reasons to remove a limb, and no medical doctor will do so without justification.
I had thought that also but apparently it is the only way some of those people recover, nothing else works.
There are a surprisingly large number of “amputation fixations” in the world, and they are psychiatric mysteries.
About the only grand example of successful treatment comes from South America. It began with a young surgeon posted to a large insane asylum. Four patients had amputation fixations, and were unresponsive to all psychiatric drugs given them. They could not function at all and were typically kept heavily medicated. Otherwise they were despondent to the point of suicide.
So after years worth of consultations, debates and arguments, he finally got permission to surgically remove the leg of one patient who was fixated on just that leg.
Traumatic to about everyone, after his leg was removed, his psychiatric problems vanished. After extensive psychological testing showed him entirely normal, he was released to return to his family.
The second patient has a similar result, taking him from being unable to function to normal and healthy.
A third patient had a similar result, but his fixation was on a leg and one of his arms, but just up to his elbow. After removing his leg, he showed considerable improvement, but he was very clear that it was temporary as he was then really compelled to lose that part of his arm as well.
Again, as with the second amputation, he ended up almost normal, but did need a little medication on a long term basis, well within normal range.
The fourth patient however, only got minimal result from an amputation, and needed continued hospitalization.
After these four, however, the national medical association called a halt to any further therapeutic amputations. They were just overwhelmed, so figured that it would take decades or more to try and get a handle on things.
However, the Internet has other ideas. When word got out about amputation fixations, people from around the world started to connect with each other to discover it is not just a few, isolated cases.
And there are other groups involved with similar psychiatric problems: men who want to be castrated, and those who want to be trepanned (hole(s) drilled in skull), being among the most common."
I wasn't being flip. I am curious about the different reaction to sex reassignment surgery and how people relate to the amputation fixations.
I have been puzzling this and trying to understand it for a couple of weeks now. It has me baffled.
I'm opposed to both types of mutilation, unless a hermaphrodite makes a decision to determine his/her gender as an adult or at least a teen. I am against parents deciding the sex of the child.
The above post is taken from this thread..
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3044084/posts