SHE’D SEEN ENOUGH

A woman was so desperate to become blind she convinced a psychologist to pour drain cleaner into her eyes. Jewel Shuping, 30, from Raleigh, North Carolina, has BIID (Body Integrity Identity Disorder), which makes people believe they are meant to be disabled. As a child she stared at the Sun to destroy her sight, and in her teens began using dark glasses and a white stick, and learned to read Braille. In 2006 she found a sympathetic psychologist who performed the gruesome deed. “It hurt, let me tell you,” said Jewel, whose family have disowned her. “My eyes were screaming and I had some drain cleaner going down my cheek burning my skin, but all I could think was, ‘I’m going blind, it’s going to be OK’.” It took about six months for the damage to take full effect. The liquid destroyed her left eye while scars, cataracts and glaucoma closed her right one. Supported by her blind fiancé Mike, 50, she said: “I feel I should have been blind from birth. This is not a choice. It’s a need based on a disorder of the brain… People with BIID get trains to run over their legs to make themselves paralysed. It’s dangerous. They need professional help” – though perhaps not the kind of ‘help’ she got.

All the reports stem from a Barcroft TV clip, with no corroboration. Snopes, the contemporary legend website, points out that in a 17 April 2015 article about Shuping by North Carolina station WNCN, she went by a different name (Amber) and had a different story: “Amber Shuping, 29, lost her eyesight in a freak accident at the age of 20. ‘I was pouring drain cleaner down the drain and it splashed back in my face,’ Shuping said. Depression set in following the accident but Shuping said she learned to cope with her loss. ‘Once I learned that my life wasn’t over, I was OK with it,’ she said.” However, the Yahoo! discussion group ‘wanwannabe blind 2’ includes archived posts from mid-2008 in which a woman named Jewel discussed her