Jewel Shuping says she always wanted to be blind, even when she was a child. The woman is said to “suffer from Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID),” a ‘condition’ that causes healthy people to believe they are meant to be disabled. This group of people may also be referred to as transabled. Shuping’s desire to be disabled led her to find a psychologist who was willing to help her become blind.
Shuping had the psychologist pour drain cleaner in her eyes. Over the next several months, she slowly went blind, just as she intended. She lost her left eye, and lost all of her sight in her right eye.
“I really feel this is the way I was supposed to be born, that I should have been blind from birth,” Shuping told the Daily Mail. “When there’s nobody around you who feels the same way, you start to think that you’re crazy. But I don’t think I’m crazy, I just have a disorder.”
The woman’s obsession with being blind started during childhood. She claims her mother often found her wandering the halls like a blind person when she was just 3 or 4 years old. She would also ‘spend hours staring at the sun,’ long after her mother told her to stop doing so, because it would damage her eyes. [1]
But that’s what Shuping wanted.
“By the time I was six I remember that thinking about being blind made me feel comfortable,” she says.
Shuping began wearing thick black sunglasses as a teenager, started using a cane by the age of 18, and had learned how to read Braille by age 20.
“I was ‘blind-stimming’, 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 says. (continue reading)