Capgras Syndrome, Out of Body Experience and Autoprosopagnosia: Case Study with Literature Review
Nabil Ahmed Numan MD, Ph.D.
Psychosis, characterized by hallucinations and delusions, is a common feature of psychiatric disease,
especially schizophrenia. In the case of psychosis, the subject suffers from delusion (false beliefs) and
hallucination (false perception); the impression for non-specialists is schizophrenia. In this presentation
the patient has both delusion (false belief) and hallucination (false perception), but the diagnosis was
not psychosis or schizophrenia. The false belief represents the Capgras syndrome, whereas the false
perception is represents autoscopic phenomenon (AP), i.e. out of body experience (OBE). Capgras
syndrome is a 'falsely believes' that a close relative or friend has been replaced by doubles or imposters.
Whereas the out of body experience -false perception- the subject feels that his/her “self”, or is located
outside the physical body and somewhat elevated, from this elevated extra personal location that
subject experiences seeing his body and the world. In addition, something's happening to the patient;
he experiences an inability to recognize his face in mirror (autoprosopagnosia). All this occurred to
an 18-year-old patient who left the hospital one week later post head injury, brought to my office with
his father six weeks ago after complete recovering from subdural hematoma in the right frontoparietal
lobes, post motorcycle accident.
