A 30-year-old woman, who has been obsessed with blindness from her childhood has finally had her wish come true after she got a psychologist to help her destroy her eyesight.
Jewel Shuping
Jewel Shuping is a 30 year old woman from North Carolina who has always longed to become blind right from when she was a child.
“My mother would find me walking in the halls at night, when I was three or four years old. By the time I was six, I remember that thinking about being blind made me feel comfortable,” said Jewel who admitted to even spending hours staring at the sun, hoping that it would damage her eyes.
According to reports, Jewel has been inflicted with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) which is a serious psychological condition that gives able-bodied people a strong desire to be disabled and it is what made this woman purposely blind herself by dropping drain cleaner into her eyes!
The obsession increased as she aged, and by the time she was a teenager, Jewel had taught herself to move around in thick black sunglasses. She got her first cane at age 18 and became fully fluent in braille by age 20. “I was blind-swimming, 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,” she said.
Eventually, Jewel claims to have found a psychologist willing to help her become blind. In 2006, the duo put numbing eye drops followed by a couple of drops of drain cleaner in each of her eyes. The pain was excruciating, but the thought of going blind kept her happy. “My eyes were screaming and I had some drain cleaner going down my cheek burning my skin,” she said. “But all I could think was ‘I am going blind, it is going to be okay.’”
She was then rushed to the hospital where medics tried everything to restore her vision. “When I woke up the following day I was joyful, until I turned on to my back and opened my eyes – I was so enraged when I saw the TV screen,” she said. But over six months, her eyesight slowly diminished to nothing.
When Jewel’s family came to know that she had blinded herself on purpose, they disowned her. But she has received support from her ex-fiance Mike, who is legally blind from natural causes. Jewel is now studying for a degree in education and says she has no regrets for what she did. All she wants to do now is help other blind people live an independent life. She also is trying to raise awareness of BIID and encourage others suffering from it to seek professional help.