Chloe Jennings-White Has Said She Wants Her Spine Severed

“Something in my brain tells me my legs are not supposed to work. Having any sensation in them just feels wrong,” says Chloe Jennings-White. She has said she wants a surgeon to cut her spinal cord. She wants to live in a wheel chair for the rest of her life.  Is she crazy? Does she want disability payments? 

None of the above. The cause is either organic within the brain or a profound psychological disturbance.

The era in which we live has a name for her situation. She is transabled. She has felt this way since she was four years old.

She thought she was a freak until one day.  Read on.

For years she used props to pretend she was disabled but in this era she is public about her feelings.

A Fulbright scholar and research scientist, she has a PhD in organic chemistry from Cambridge University and is happily married..

She has been diagnosed with Body Integrity Identity Disorder, or BIID.

If organic, BIID is thought to be caused by a faulty  right parietal lobe, where the brain maps the body.  

She feels uncomfortable with her normal, healthy, fully functioning body. She experiences a mismatch between her physical body and her mental image of her body. In an effort to achieve consonance between her body and her “identity,” she has engaged in risky activities and self-harm, hoping that injuries would result in the type of body with which she identifies. 

The organic supposition is that the parietal lobe cannot see a certain body part and reports it missing, thus causing deep disturbance in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain.  She believes both of her legs do not belong to her and to make things right she dreams of becoming paralyzed from the waist down. Something in her legs just feels wrong, she says.

In trying to understand how she feels, imagine yourself with a migraine headache. You can tell yourself you shouldn't feel the pain, but that doesn't ease the headache.  She feels terrible anxiety and cries.  Her fears are soothed when she is in a wheel chair.  

If psychological, consider that she wears leg braces as her aunt, hurt in an accident did. She was extremely close to her aunt. Her therapist has sought to relieve her suffering and notes the bond that existed between them. At nine, in North London she rode her bike off a stage, landing on her neck four feet below, trying to cripple herself.  Today in the Utah mountains she skis extremely fast and aims for the most dangerous turns, always pushing the edge because she might fall and injure herself.  She feels the greatest peace on the slopes.  After a skiing accident, she suffered a minor back injury and searched for leg braces online.  

For years she thought she was a freak. While searching she discovered a name for her mental condition, BIID, finding she was not alone.  "It was a huge relief," she said.  "I wasn't a freak--there were hundreds of others like me."

She insists that people who scoff at her must understand one thing. She suffers. Wheel chairs and leg braces help relieve the suffering.

For years she kept her daily torments to herself.  Now she has come out of the closet and, as part of a BIID research study, began using a wheel chair after consultations with Dr. Michael First, who recommended it to help relieve her suffering.  

She openly uses it despite accusations.  She is a fraud. She wants attention.  If that were the case, why then in the past did she bandage herself secretly?

Today she lives openly with her condition despite intolerance, insults, and online threats. She suffers, she tells people, and no matter what reason tells her the suffering won't go away.

To ease her daily suffering, she spends most of her time in a wheelchair, though able to stand and walk.  In 2010 she found a doctor overseas willing to cut her sciatic and femoral nerves, but she could not afford the $20,000 he wanted in order to render her an invalid.  Of it, she said, " I know, truly and deeply, I won't regret it if I ever can" afford it.  This is a strange statement indeed and we--with normal brain maps or without severe mental disorders--can only begin to understand it by imagining ourselves with her brain and mind, one that daily over-rides reason with fears, tears, and anxieties. 

Her current psychiatrist, Dr Mark Malan, underscores the severity of her disturbance by saying this: "The question I often ask is, is it better to have somebody pretending to use a wheelchair, or to commit suicide?"