Capgras Syndrome

Imagine that, for a moment, you meet someone who, over time, is characterized by being able to treat everyone in your social circle normally, and gradually an idea takes hold of that person.

Suppose the individual no longer recognizes his mother. Furthermore, she fervently believes that she is not who she says she is and that she has been supplanted by an identical imposter. This is Capgras syndrome.

It’s a disorder, part of a psychotic process. The patient has the delusional belief that a close person with whom he has an emotional bond has been replaced by someone else, an identical replacement.

This causes intense fear and rejection towards that person. This usually happens to a family member you live with.

Etymology

The name of this syndrome, as in other cases, is due to the person who made its discovery. In this case, Jean Marie Joseph Capgras, a French psychiatrist who discovered this disease under the name of  “double illusion”  in the early 1920s, in the 20th century.

Capgras reported the case of a 74-year-old woman who claimed that her husband had been replaced by a stranger. The patient easily recognized the other family members. Everyone except the husband.  An entire psychiatric history of an illness, at that time, unknown.

Capgras syndrome symptoms

In fact, professionals in psychiatry classify it as a loss of emotional recognition. That is, you know who is in front of you, see them, remember, but the emotional bond that brought you together has been forgotten, considering them now as a stranger.

The symptoms of Capgras syndrome often have similarities with other dissociative elements of different human conditions, such as: paranoid ideas, delusional conviction, serious family or marital problems, normality with the rest of people.

Of interest: 5 myths about the psychopathic personality

Causes

Studies on this disorder are still scarce, which makes it difficult to have a precise understanding of the cause. Another difficulty that must be added to the study of this disease is the similarity that the symptoms of Capgras syndrome have to other psychotic disorders.

During the 1990s, several studies and investigations were carried out on some of the possible triggers of this distortion of human behavior. Below, some of the relevant data obtained are presented:

• In 1990, in a paper published in the  British Journal of Psychiatry, psychologists Haydn Ellis and Young Andy hypothesized that patients with Capgras syndrome may have a mirror image of prosopagnosia. That is,  their conscious ability to recognize faces was intact, but they could have system damage that produces automatic emotional activation of the face and familiar faces. This can lead to non-recognition of a person close to you.

• In 1997, Haydn Ellis and his colleagues published a study of 5 patients with Capgras delirium (all diagnosed with schizophrenia). They confirmed that although they could consciously recognize faces, they  did not show a normal automatic emotional activation response.

Diagnosis

For the diagnosis of this disease, both a neurologist and a psychiatrist (or neuropsychiatrist)  must perform the following tests:

• Verbal, phonological and semantic fluency test   to assess the language, since a reduction in verbal fluency was observed in these patients.
• Cubes test, Wais test, to measure visual-spatial-visual-constructive capacity.

• Multitasking test  to support executive functions, which are heavily dependent on the frontal lobes.
• Verbal tests  to check the state of memory, since changes in this ability were observed in patients with this syndrome.

Do you want to know more? Types of dementia other than Alzheimer’s

Treatment

Unfortunately, the causes of Capgras syndrome are unknown. Therefore , there is still no specific treatment for this disorder. The measures taken are palliative. That is, we try to control symptoms mainly through the use of some psychotropic drugs such as:

• Anticonvulsants are often used as supportive treatment.

• Psychological therapy to enable the individual to carry out a cognitive reconstruction.
• Antipsychotics are used to combat the patient’s delusional conviction. In addition to the use of anxiolytics as well.