Scientists from the United States have described the cat substitution syndrome. This is a very unusual disorder: it seems to a person that his pet has been changed, and the cat, moreover, is watching him.
The results of a study by neuropathologists from the United States were published in the Neurocase edition. The subject was an elderly man aged 71. He once played hockey, as a result of which he received many injuries. The patient also suffered from alcoholism. The patient had to take special medications, but gave up this practice several years before the events described. The result was not long in coming, and soon the patient began to develop paranoid ideas. According to this man, he was constantly being followed. Allegedly, the FBI agents even changed the cat, and now the animal is also "involved in the operation."
Scientists themselves believe that we are talking about a kind of delusional negative twin. In this case, the patient believes that some of his relatives have been replaced by others. In some cases, the victim thinks that he himself has a mysterious double: this is supposedly the explanation for the bad deeds attributed to the person. Something similar, by the way, can be found in the novel of the Italian historian-medievalist Umberto Eco “The Island on the Eve”. There, the protagonist has an "evil double".
Psychiatry knows relatively few cases when the patient announced the substitution of the animal. Prior to this, several similar incidents were described related to the alleged substitution of cats, dogs and birds. However, the new case with a cat is different in that now, using tomography, scientists have discovered deep organic damage to the cerebral cortex and pointed to a hypothetical link between the deviation and previous injuries. The researchers say that this kind of disturbance could be caused by a "mismatch" in the recognition mechanism of the object and the memories associated with it.
We add that psychiatrists do not have a single point of view regarding the delusions of the negative double. Sometimes this deviation is viewed in the context of other diseases such as schizophrenia. And therefore it is seen not as a syndrome, but as a symptom.
History, by the way, knows cases when real objects of surveillance were taken for mentally ill people. Among them, in particular, was the writer Ernest Hemingway. They tried to treat him, but Hemingway could not stand the stress and took his own life. Later it turned out that the FBI was really following the writer. The surveillance was carried out as part of the COINTELPRO project. The latter, however, does not mean at all that the story with the twin cat is real.
Ilya Vedmedenko