The Lame Who Can Walk and the Blind Who Can See – Are People with Body Integrity Dysphoria Severely Disabled?

Maryam Tabesh¹ and Erich Kasten²*

¹Kattunbleiche 8, 22041 Hamburg, Germany
²Professor, Practice for Psychotherapy, Am Krautacker 25, 23570 Travemünde, Germany

*Corresponding Author: Erich Kasten, Professor, Practice for Psychotherapy, Am Krautacker 25, 23570 Travemünde, Germany.

Received: October 06, 2025; Published: November 15, 2025

Abstract

Goal: The main question of the study is whether someone should receive an official confirmation as a severely disabled person, even though this person does not actually have a disability, but simply does not want to walk for psychological reasons? Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID) encompasses the desire to have a disability, e.g. to have a paraplegia, to be blind, to be deaf or to have a limb amputated. Only with this disability those affected feel “complete”. BID was integrated into version 11 of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in 2022, this will raise legal and administrative questions.

Method: A survey of 49 people affected was carried out for this purpose. The data were compared with a parallelized group of patients who had received a degree of disability due to a real physical disorder.

Results: 34 of those affected by BID stated that they had made the diagnosis themselves, i.e. only a small proportion had a well-founded medical diagnosis. Of those affected by BID who had an official disability card (n = 13), however, only six stated to have a disability ID solely because of the Body Integrity Dysphoria disease.

Conclusions: Current research suggests that BID is a congenital neurological malfunction in the brain; affected patients suffer greatly from this disorder. They are not to blame; it's not that they don't want to walk, but rather that they are psychologically unable to move. At least some government agencies recognize this and actually grant those affected recognition as severely disabled.

 Keywords: Body Integrity Dysphoria; Body Identity Integrity Disorder; Degree of Disability; Confirmation as Severe Disabled

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Citation

Citation: Maryam Tabesh and Erich Kasten. “The Lame Who Can Walk and the Blind Who Can See – Are People with Body Integrity Dysphoria Severely Disabled?”.Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 9.12 (2025): 43-50.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2025 Maryam Tabesh and Erich Kasten. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.