Taroudant - An American woman has voluntarily chosen to become blind in order to fulfill her childhood dream.
Taroudant – An American woman has voluntarily chosen to become blind in order to fulfill her childhood dream.
Jewel Shuping, from North Carolina, USA, has been diagnosed with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), which is a psychological disorder in which healthy people believe they should have been disabled.
After a strong desire to lose her sight, Shuping asked a sympathetic psychologist to pour drain cleaner into her eyes, so that she could enjoy blindness, a desire she has been dreaming of since childhood.
Shuping said, “When I was young my mother would find me walking in the halls at night, when I was three or four years old. By the time I was six I remember that thinking about being blind made me feel comfortable.”
As a child, she would spend hours staring at the sun after her mom told her not to stare at the sun so as not to harm her vision.
“I was ‘blind-simming’, which is pretending to be blind, but the idea kept coming up in my head and by the time I was 21 it was a non-stop alarm that was going off.”
Shuping said that when she first had drain cleaner poured in her eyes, it was extremely painful. “My eyes were screaming and I had some drain cleaner going down my cheek burning my skin.”
However, she never cared about the pain as long as she would realize her long cherished dream.
“But all I could think was ‘I am going blind, it is going to be okay,” she said.
Shuping admits she was under the influence of a disorder and decided to share her sad story to help raise public awareness of BIID and to encourage people with the condition to seek professional help.
