Lucky no 55 :) | The Cotard delusion |

The Cotard delusion (also Cotard's Syndrome and Walking Corpse Syndrome) is a rare mental illness, in which the afflicted person holds the delusion that they are dead, either figuratively or literally; yet said delusion of negation is not a symptom essential to the syndrome proper. Statistical analysis of a hundred-patient cohort indicates that the denial of self-existence is a symptom present in 69 percent of the cases of Cotard's syndrome; yet, paradoxically, 55 percent of the patients might present delusions of immortality.

The neurologist Jules Cotard (1840–89) described "The Delirium of Negation" as a mental illness of varied severity.

In 1880, the neurologist Jules Cotard, described the condition as Le délire des négations ("The Delirium of Negation"), a psychiatric syndrome of varied severity; a mild case is characterized by despair and self-loathing, and a severe case is characterized by intense delusions of negation and chronic psychiatric depression. The case of Mademoiselle X describes a woman who denied the existence of parts of her body, of her need to eat, and said that she was condemned to eternal damnation, and so could not die a natural death. In the course of suffering "The Delirium of Negation," Mademoiselle X died of starvation.

As a mental illness, Cotard's Syndrome also includes the patient's delusion that he or she does not exist as a person; that he or she is putrefying; and the delusion either of having lost blood or internal organs, or both. The Cotard delusion is not included to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, neither to the DSM-IV (1994) nor to the DSM-IV-TR (2000) editions. In the tenth edition of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10), of the World Health Organization, code F22 identifies the Cotard delusion as a disease of human health.