Woman Uses Drain Cleaner to Blind Self with Help of Psychologist

One North Carolina woman has finally ‘achieved her dream of being blind’ by having a psychologist pour drain cleaner on her eyes.

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.

Finally, in 2006, she found the psychologist who would help her go blind. He numbed her eyes and placed a drop of drain cleaner in each eye – but it was still excruciatingly painful.

“My eyes were screaming and I had some drain cleaner going down my cheek burning my skin,” she recalls. “But all I could think was ‘I am going blind, it is going to be okay.’”

Shuping was taken to a hospital, where doctors and nurses wanted to save Shuping’s sight, but she refused. The North Carolina woman thought she would be blinded immediately, but it took about 6 months for her to completely lose her sight, which was a frustrating reality for the 30-year-old.

“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.”

Her left eye finally suffered a “corneal meltdown,” collapsing in on itself, and was eventually removed. The right eye had glaucoma and cataracts, as well as a webbing of scars, leaving Shuping unable to see.

Shuping says:

“I really feel this is the way I was supposed to be born, that I should have been blind from birth. 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.”

Shuping warns others with BIID not to physically harm themselves the way she did, and to seek professional help instead. [3]

She says:

“Don’t go blind the way I did. I know there is a need but perhaps someday there will be treatment for it. People with BIID get trains to run over their legs, freeze dry their legs, or fall off cliffs to try to paralyse themselves. It’s very, very dangerous. And they need professional help.”

Additional Sources:

[1] Mirror