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Concept
Body integrity dysphoria
Summary
Body integrity dysphoria (BID), also referred to as body integrity identity disorder (BIID), amputee identity disorder or xenomelia, and formerly called apotemnophilia, is a mental disorder characterized by a desire to have a sensory or physical disability or feeling discomfort with being able-bodied, beginning in early adolescence and resulting in harmful consequences. BID appears to be related to somatoparaphrenia. People with this condition may refer to themselves as transabled.
BID is a rare, infrequently studied condition in which there is a mismatch between the mental and the physical body, characterized by an intense desire for amputation or paralysis of a limb, usually a leg, or to become blind or deaf. The person sometimes has a sense of sexual arousal connected with the desire for loss of a limb, movement, or sense.
Some become somewhat more comfortable with their own bodies by pretending they are amputees using prostheses and other tools to help their dysphoria, by using a wheelchair or by blocking their vision or hearing. Some people with BID have reported to the media or by interview with researchers that they have resorted to self-amputation of a "superfluous" limb by, for example, allowing a train to run over it or otherwise damaging it so severely that surgeons will have to amputate it. However, the medical literature records few, if any, cases of self-amputation. There has been, however, at least one apparently well-documented example.
To the extent that generalizations can be made, people with BID appear to start to wish for amputation when they are young, between eight and twelve years of age, and often knew a person with an amputated limb when they were children; however, people with BID tend to seek treatment only when they are much older. People with BID seem to be predominantly male, and while there is no evidence that sexual preference is relevant, there does seem to be a correlation with BID and a person having a paraphilia; there appears to be a weak correlation with personality disorders.
Official source
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