Capgras Syndrome

Capgras syndrome (Capgras delusion) — psychopathological syndrome. Classified as a delusional syndrome from the class of delusions, which is the wrong identification of people, places or objects. Pathology can develop in the acute, transition or chronic form. He was described by the French psychiatrist Capgras in 1923 and named illusion des sosies.

This disorder is divided into two types:

• Autostoppisti type, in which the patient is sure that he is double;
• In fact, the Capgras syndrome, in which the double is present in the form of invisible.

It incorporates a positive double nonsense, nonsense negative double, syndrome Fregoli and brad internetamerica.

The nonsense double negative - the patient believes that someone from his entourage (husband, wife, parents, friends, Pets, etc.) or he himself was replaced by a lookalike.

Nonsense positive double - the patient takes an unknown persons for friends and relatives.

Syndrome Fregoli - the belief of the patient that people around him are actually familiar with it, the person who changes the appearance and makes himself up to be covered.

Nonsense internetamerica - pathological belief of the patient that some persons (for example, his pursuers) are constantly changing their appearance and/or your inner self in order to remain unrecognized by the patient and thus hide their hostile intentions.

A typical case from a report of passer and Warnaka about Capgras delusion (1991):

Mrs. D., 74-year-old married housewife... believed that her husband was replaced by another foreign man. She refused to sleep with the impostor, locked the bedroom and asked my son a gun and joined the fight with the police, who came to hospitalize her. Sometimes she believed that her husband was her long deceased father. The rest of the family it is easily learned.

Today, under the Capgras syndrome understand a neurological disorder in which, primarily, the confusion is a result from organic brain lesions or degeneration. It usually develops in patients with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury, dementia, in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases. At the moment it is under active study of the causes and mechanisms of occurrence.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»