The shocking story of how one woman became a zombie - and came back to tell the tale

'I was convinced I had died...'

A rare illness dubbed "walking corpse syndrome" leaves people living as if they were zombies. Patients are unable to relate to the world around them, often believe they have died and often suffer depression.

Esmé Weijun Wang wrote the essay "Perdition Days," in which she described her "death." It began when she felt scatterbrained and eventually the feeling evolved to the point where she was unable to understand who she was and how her existence related to the world around her.

Wang worried she was experiencing early signs of psychosis and tried reading a self-help book, reorganized her work space, purchased and scribbled in five datebook planners and eventually began to question her job as a writer.

One morning she woke her husband in tears, telling him she understood why she felt so strange: She had died a month before. During a flight from San Francisco to London, she experienced an unexplained drifting between consciousness and unconsciousness for four hours. Wang believed she died during the experience and that was why nothing felt right.

She wrote, "I was convinced that I had died on that flight, and I was in the afterlife and hadn't realized it until that moment. That was the beginning of when I was convinced that I was dead."
Though her husband attempted to convince her that she was alive, she lost the desires to work, talk and eat. For two months she believed she was dead when really she was suffering from Cotard's syndrome. Patients usually believe they have died or are nonexistent and explain away all evidence they are alive.

The earliest recorded patient of Cotard's syndrome was in the 1800s and was described by Jules Cotard to be a type of depression characterized by anxious melancholy and delusions about a patient's body. Cotard's patient was a 43-year-old woman who believed she had no organs, only the "skin and bones of a decomposing body."

Cotard's syndrome is also known as "walking corpse syndrome," which psychiatrist Jesús Ramírez-Bermúdez at the National Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery of Mexico has treated fourteen people for. 

His first case was a man who believed he was dead and had delusions of a twin brother who still lived. The patient often attempted suicide, and Ramírez-Bermúdez said, "He would say that he had thrown himself out of the car because he thought he was trapped in an eternity in which things were not real, and he was not real. He also felt that perhaps by dying [again] he would recover his former self."

Unlike Ramírez-Bermúdez's patient, Wang was unable to feel emotion, which led to a rise in anxiety, fear and agitation. She fell into catatonic psychosis, an illness leaving people first unable to move then moving much more than usual. 

"I began to believe I was in perdition, or some kind of hell," Wang wrote. "I was trying to figure out what I had done wrong, what had condemned me to this afterlife that looked like my real life before I died but wasn't real - that was the torment of it."

The cause of Cotard's syndrome is unknown, but scientists compare it to Capgras delusion and believe two types of brain impairment are involved. The first changes the patient's brain from its normal functioning and the second changes a patient's ability to reason.

Max Coltheart, an emeritus professor of cognitive science at Macquarie University in Australia is a pioneer in the two-impairment theory. He said, "You have one impairment that prompts the belief that, for example, this isn't your wife. The second impairment is of your normal ability to evaluate beliefs, and accept or reject them." 

Though the two-factor theory has yet to be full explored in Cotard's syndrome, Coldheart believes it is comparable. He explained the lack of an emotional response is a reasonable response for Cotard's patients to believe they have died.

In her paper, Wang wrote, "I was doomed to wander forever in a world that was not mine, in a body that was not mine; I was doomed to be surrounded by creatures and so-called people that mimicked the lovely world that I'd once known, but ... could evoke no emotion in me."

Wang was experiencing several effects of Lyme and bi-polar disease, which resulted in the diagnosis of Cotard's syndrome and, less than two-months following her realization she was "dead," the feeling faded. The delusion "lifted completely without fanfare. There was no beam of light from the heavens; I was just going along and somebody pointed out that I was acting different. "

Ramírez-Bermúdez said Cotard's patients usually experience symptoms that last only a few days or weeks and very few experience chronic Cotard's that last months or years. The original patient Jules Cotard treated suffered the chronic form and eventually died of starvation.

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