Capgras Syndrome, Out of Body Experience and Autoprosopagnosia: Case Study with Literature Review

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 Capgras syndrome is a 'falsely believes' that a close relative or friend has been replaced by doubles or imposters.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.