#Depression may have caused woman to believe she was a chicken

When being a human gets too hard, the brain will cope with psychological stress in fascinating ways.

While most of the 260 million people worldwide who suffer from depression will have common symptoms, such as sadness, fatigue, disinterest and sleeplessness, an exceedingly rare few could lose their humanity completely — by assuming the identity of an animal, according to researchers at KU Leuven in Belgium.

In the Dutch medical journal Tijdschrift voor Psychiatrie, psychologists described the case of one 54-year-old woman, unnamed in their case study, who was found in her garden “clucking and crowing like a rooster”  — a condition called zoanthropy, or the delusion of believing oneself is not human, but animal.

They described the woman as being “disoriented” during their examination, while also reporting an unfamiliar sensation in her limbs, “as if they were not fit for her body … and flapped uncontrollably,” the study read. The patient noted that she’d hardly slept in five days.

The woman, a pharmacy employee, was brought to the emergency room after her brother found her “displaying stereotyped behavior” of a chicken. She had no history of substance abuse or psychotic episodes prior. But the family attributed her behavior to the recent loss of a loved one, for which she had been suffering a two-month bout of depression — which runs in her family.

They also learned that she had been avoiding friends during that time, and had recently received negative feedback at work.

Doctors learned that the woman had been prescribed anti-depressant and anti-anxiety treatments as well as sleep aids following the death of a parent 10 years ago, and had continued the regimen up until recently, when she made a switch to a new anti-depressant. They speculate this change may also have set off an imbalance in her brain.

During their psychiatric consultation, the patient suffered a tonic-clonic seizure, also known as a grand mal seizure, marked by convulsions, foaming at the mouth and cyanosis, or a bluish skin tone due to a poor blood-oxygen level. After an emergency dose of an anti-epileptic drug, the woman slept for several hours at the hospital.

Upon waking, she was back to normal — but she had no recollection of her stint as a chicken.

There have only been  56 other documented cases of zoanthropy since 1850. Other patients have morphed into a wolf, lion, cat, rabbit, boar or snake, to name a few.

Perhaps one of the first known cases of zoanthropy can be found in the Bible’s book of Daniel where it is written that King Nebuchadnezzar was condemned by God to live as a cow — called boanthropy — for seven years as a remedy for the Babylonian ruler’s arrogance. Medical historians believe, if not God, that his condition may have been part of hallucinations caused by advanced syphilis or some other neurological disorder.