Hair aside, she is REALLY pretty.

At least Dolly wins in the big hair department.

Thank you for this well-written and fascinating article. Morgellons and other non-real diseases always sounded to me like cries for help and, as NonServiam pointed out, part of our culture’s dismissal of mental illnesses as real. But your comments about the reality of pain struck a chord.

The fact that their symptoms are bound to psychiatric disorder does not lessen their pain but enhances it.

I worked for an HIV Hotline for 2 years... people woule call CONSTANTLY after having taken, say 10 tests, years after a potential exposure, still convinced that they were positive but that the doctors were lying or the tests didn’t work. They always shared their “symptoms” in detail. WebMD and weird medical internet…

In the summer of 2002, I came home from college to find all the furniture in my mother’s home piled in the center of the living room as she attacked it with some sort of spray. My sister, who just finished first grade, had a head lice scare at school and she was being proactive.

But it often is physical in a sense. If you were to do an MRI on these people’s brain, you can see that they’re experiencing pain. It seems real because it is real.

Yeah, I once had a psychosomatic allergic reaction (thought I tasted the thing that would set it off) and it FELT like a regular reaction.

Not exactly on topic, but brief soapboxing: Thomas Browne actually isn’t minor (even if his account of Morgellons is), he was an important essayist of the late English Renaissance.

“Some were also nerve fibers: in extreme cases of delusional parasitosis, patients will dig practically to the bone in a futile effort to stop the pain.”

If the majority of the fibers examined are clothing materials, I wonder if there’s the possibility that this is somehow a skin permeability disorder... that is, microscopic fragments of cotton, nylon, or whatever else are able to wedge their way into the skin or pores and accumulate until they start triggering foreign…

What you should absolutely not do is a Google images search of Morgellons. Especially before you planned to go to lunch.

My brother has this delusion and it has completely ruined his life. Well, I guess in fairness it’s probably his drug addiction that has ruined his life, and is probably what makes him think there are bugs living in his skin. My mother has basically given up her life to care for him and he takes full advantage of it.…

“Freemasons are running the country!”

"Disease has always had a hierarchy. To suffer from a rare disorder that has been definitively traced to a biological origin is preferable to being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. One patient suffers heroically, the other is simply insane."

I was surprised this piece didn't reference Leslie Jamison's excellent essay on Morgellons for her book The Empathy Exams (published in Harper's first): http://harpers.org/archive/2013/0…

creepiest image...

Bystander effect. All these people were seeing this and wondering “why is no one doing anything? Should I do something? But why is no one else doing anything?” I bet a bunch thought it must be on the level, because no one was doing anything, and just went about their day.

They could...oh you know...CALL THE COPS. You don’t have to interject yourself into a situation to help someone.