User:BrokenDancer

Cacodemomania
'''Hi all. I came across this little known (and unfortunately, little used or cited) psychological disorder during one of my forrays into old and unusual court cases. Thought you might be interested if you're writing anything to do with a mental patient, or if you particularly like to use five dollar words. '''

Cacodemomania is a mental disorder with three root words: Caco- Greek, meaning bad. Demo- from the Greek "demon", meaning "wise man". Mania- Also Greek, for "madness". In short, "bad wise man madness". Which would be the name of my metal band, if I was in one.

In essence, cacodemomania is a powerful mental illness in which a person believes that he or she is possessed by the (or a) devil.

The person will have delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and will lapse into psychotic or suicidal actions if an adequate amount of therapy coupled with powerful anti-psychotic medication is not given and maintained. It only occurs among people that are very religious. I will stress that this is not to say they are or become possessed by any demon or devil, but they believe themselves to be, and hear the voice of the devil telling them to do things that their mind believes an evil being would tell them to do.

A famous case of cacodemomania is Andrea Yates. In the mid 1990s, she began to show signs of mental illness. She and her husband were very religious, and they believed that they should "have as many children as God would provide." After her fourth child, Andrea attempted suicide twice, and we sent to a psychologist, where she was prescribed anti-psychotic medication. She was also told never to have another child as this depression grows worse after every child. However, a year or so later, she was so much happier and healthier due to her sessions and medication that she decided to have another child and stop taking her pills. Medications meant to alter your brain chemistry are supposed to help your brain become more balanced when faced with imbalance, however going off of this medication changes the brain yet again. It becomes less likely that the medication will work if put on it a second time, and the chance becomes greater that the existing mental disorder will change or worsen.

In Andrea's case, she became convinced that she was possessed. She exhibited obsessive behaviour including picking and scratching at her scalp where she believed the devil had branded 666 into her head. She saw visions that one of her children would become a serial killer, and another would become a mute homosexual prostitute, and other such predictions. As a result of these visions, she began to believe that her children would never get into heaven, and the only way to ensure that they would not go to hell was to kill them before they committed any sins. In 2001, she drowned all 5 of them in the bathtub.

Plenty of people have used "the devil made me do it" as a get out of jail free card, but in Andrea Yates's case, it was found to be legitimate. She actually believed that the devil was telling her that her children ought to die. Of course, this indicated that, since she was religious, she knew that whatever the devil would say must be wrong, so she must have known that what she was doing was evil. It created a bit of a catch-22 in the mind of the judge, and she was given 2 trials. In the end, she was found to be insane, and thereby not criminally responsible. She was sentenced to treatment in a high-security medical hospital.

Credit goes to: http://horror-stories.deviantart.com/journal/Cacodemomania-458040786