“Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist
ought to have his head examined.” Samuel Goldwyn
In the 1956 science fiction movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Miles Bennell is a doctor in a small California town. He is inundated with phone calls from local people who insist that their family members are not the same people anymore, that they have changed in some way. He eventually discovers that the townspeople are being replaced by physically identical alien duplicates.
Like Dr. Bennell’s patients, people with the Capgras syndrome are convinced that something is wrong with those closest to them. The Capgras syndrome is a delusion, or false belief, that significant others, usually a spouse or family members, have been replaced by imposters, exact duplicates.
The disorder was first described by a French psychiatrist in 1923. The Capgras syndrome is often associated with organic brain disease such as dementia, stroke, epilepsy, or traumatic brain injury. The syndrome also occurs without organic brain disease in patients who have psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.
Probably all patients with the Capgras syndrome should be evaluated for underlying neurological disease with CT or MRI and other studies. Psychiatric or neurologic diseases associated with the Capgras syndrome should be treated to the extent possible. Antipsychotic drugs may be helpful.
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