Oh! Another Apotemnophilia Post!

I hate to jump on the bandwagon and add another post within the ever-growing Apotemnophilia category, but I can't help it - It's just that damn transfixing.

Before reading Carl Elliot's article, I had never heard of the 'disorder' (I hate to use the word...but for lack of a better term at the moment I'm kind of stuck) before, and had never even imagined a world where someone would want to chop off one of their own limbs. You'd think that by this point in our class, I'd have a pretty solid and confident opinion of my stance on this 'disorder.' But of course, I don't. In fact, I'm even more confused now on what to think of it than when I had read first read the article. Thanks Ben and Robin for doing my head in every Tuesday and Thursday! (only joking....)

But anyways, going along with Nikolas Rose's term "Biopolitics", and the debate on whether people should have undisputed rights to their own bodies, I'm still at a standstill on which side I wholly agree with or not. I probably will never consider myself completely on one side of the argument or the other, because there are huge factors that play a big role when it comes to making decisions and formulating opinions within this term.

I do agree that as humans we should have rights to our own bodies. But when it comes to the act of wanting to sever perfectly healthy limbs, based on the idea that 'it never truly felt like it belonged to me,' I would like to say, "Society, step in. By all means make sure this individual wants to keep their limbs no matter what!" But because there have been cases in which people have gone to the extreme measures of almost killing themselves by physically trying to sever or kill their unwanted limbs before, it urges me to think differently.

We must take people with this 'disorder' seriously. Therapy isn't the miracle cure to this conundrum, but if they are monitored more closely and are able to talk to someone freely about their feelings of their body and why they detest one of their limbs, we might be able to discover more about how serious they are about losing a limb, to the extent they would go themselves to get rid of their limb, how they feel they fit into society now as compared to if they didn't have their unwanted limb, etc. We would also have a better chance at keeping them from taking matters into their own hands completely and attempting to chop off a limb if they felt as though they were being heard and understood and treated as though they aren't crazy for having this desire.

I'm not saying people haven't done a sufficient job of analyzing people who identify themselves as apotemnophiliacs so far. But if people are still finding themselves at the point of removing the limb themselves, I'm sure we could do better.