- Joined
- Apr 19, 2019
There's not a lot that the medical or psychiatric community can do to help Kelly. She's not delusional - she's not inflicting injury on herself because God is telling her to or because she thinks her legs have snakes in them. She knows she was never in a cult and that all her injuries were self-inflicted even though she lies continually. She's not a direct danger to others and while she injures herself, wastes medical resources and could eventually kill herself doing this shit, she isn't standing on a building ledge with a razor to her throat or a gun pointed at her temple. She's a danger to herself but given that there is no "patient clearly demonstrates suicidal ideation and has a plan to kill herself" element to this horror show, Canadian psychiatric services cannot institutionalize her because there's no law against cutting your body to ribbons or inserting foreign matter in wounds to create disease.
Factitious disorder is almost impossible to treat. There are very few success stories of people turning this sort of shit around. Maybe when sufferers get older and they mellow out, things get better but for the most part this behavior continues in some manner until the person dies either from old age, side effects from their self-infliction of injury, or genuine illness that they cannot get medical professionals to take them seriously about because they have decades of insane behavior on file.
I wonder how those doctors and nurses feel. You know they hated her while she was there but still endeavored to give her the best care they could. And now she's fucked it up, all those medical resources for nothing. But even if they are pissed off that she did this to herself again, I wonder if they may be refusing further treatment because this bout of self-harm had the goal of pain med acquisition rather than attention. I can see the doctors refusing to help someone they suspect is seeking meds in a way they wouldn't refuse care to even the worst Munchausen.
Unpopular opinion but I disagree that she wouldn't benefit from mental health care. Chronic skin picking is related to OCD (excoriation disorder) and Kelly is one of the most extreme skin pickers I've ever seen. I find it so hard to believe that at this stage she is not compelled to pick. This probably started as her picking at the odd pimple or freckle and just got worse and worse over time as she replaced cutting with picking.
The added bugs under my skin explanation for the compulsion can be helpful in how to treat it, this could be a symptom of psychotic paratosis but someone collecting samples they've picked from their skin because they think they are foreign objects is a symptom of Morgellons. If I hadn't known that Kelly used to self harm I would have believed that her worst bechets ever was a version of psychotic paratosis in that every discoloration, pimple or bump to her was a bechets rash and she scratched and picked at it until it was gone.
TL