What's the most interesting mental disorder you've come across?

Medical doctor here, neurologist, Capgarer delusion.

The patient is convinced that a family member has been replaced by an imposter who's completely identical.

For example, the patient will tell you the person sitting across from them looks exactly like their spouse,

sounds exactly like their spouse, has all the memories of

their spouse, but that's not actually my spouse. And the patient oftentimes isn't overly

distressed by this imposter. In 20 years, I've only seen this condition twice. Uh-huh, I was also

going to write about Capgrad illusion. I had a case a few years ago. In this instance, it was a mother

who was under the false

belief that her son was a clone. We had some success with atypical antipsychotics, and I helped

her focus her energy on being a good mother to the kid, whether it was hers or not, because she

could agree that the child was innocent and needed a loving home. Family support was also crucial.

A psychologist here, not someone I worked with, but I did observe someone with alien hand syndrome. The patient's left hand would

stroke her hair and pat her face, but was not under her control. Each episode would last about 20

minutes. Turned out, the cause was a tumour. Amazingly, it didn't seem to cause

her any distress. I once worked with a guy whose voices were positive, like a cheer squad.

So instead of, you're useless, no one likes you, his voices said, you look amazing today,

people think you're charming and funny. It wasn't great, though, despite what you'd think.

He has enough

insight to understand that they were as much a hallucination as if they were giving negative

messages, and he felt this crushing, overwhelming pressure that he couldn't live up to the

incredibly high standards set by his voices. It was quite crippling for him, really, as much

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