Loffredo Anthony, a good looking man many women would fall for. Every time he has to update his passport or verify his identity, it takes him a year or more. But Why? Well, in today’s video we are going to discuss Anthony Loffredo, the challenges he faces, for an irreversible mission he is on. We will use his reference to understand some rare mental health issues.
Loffredo Anthony has undertaken extreme body modification that includes amputating his body parts to resemble a black alien. For many of you, his features may now appear repulsive, and for some, a creative expression, bold and fascinating. The seed motivations of Anthony Loffredo to undergo this extreme irreversible journey are unknown to me. Maybe someday if I get to interview Loffredo, I would be able to get into actual details because what appears to be a psychological disorder, always has biological and environmental influences.
Now, the disorder I am referring to is BIID or Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Much is not known about this mental health condition in which a person feels that their body parts are not integrated in an order to match their identity and so, they attempt to remove, amputate those body parts. BIID is rare, unlike Major Depressive Disorder or Personality Disorders. Within BIID, there is Apotemnophilia, also known as ‘amputee identity disorder,’ is a condition where an individual experiences intense and persistent desire to amputate one or more healthy limbs or parts of limbs.
Anthony Loffredo, contextually, has amputated aka surgically removed parts of his healthy limbs such as the fingers, he has cut off his ears completely and the tip of his nose, and bifurcated his tongue based on the imagination of aliens maybe as depicted by Hollywood and scarecrow UFO videos. Overall, his situation offers an opportunity to understand BIID or Apotemnophilia. ‘
Matching symptoms is not calling it a disease. A disease of any kind must also present the physiological or psychological distress and in this case, we hear Anthony Loffredo talking about the difficulties in societal adjustments. But this is not distress caused by his body modification in his own body. Here the source of distress is society. Isn’t it? Yes, but this is also something where society is reacting to his “body modification” because the society is expected to adjust to his needs in his own attempt to stand out. You get the point? If we need to consider environmental influence to study the making of a person, we also need to consider a person’s influence on his environment that preaches how you can become anything you want!
Here, you will see Loffredo playing football, here he is on a podcast enjoying with his friends, and here he is sitting relaxed with the lady interviewing him and in all these scenes, he appears confident, relaxed, and not intimidating to the people interacting with him. This tells us that not everyone is against him.
If society doesn’t matter, why does acceptance matter? Why going out in public and being dismissed hurts us? It then tells us of our expectations from society without making it easy for society to accept us, isn’t it? But again, let’s forget society and talk about actual physical and cognitive challenges that no one discussed with reference to Anthony Loffredo. And maybe Loffredo too didn’t think much about it.
- Given his whole body is tattooed, and skin is under the ink, how can he identify early on if he is having skin diseases or autoimmune diseases that first show up on the skin?
- Given that he has tattooed his eye, do you know how complex it would get to determine his liver functions, brain functions, and notwithstanding eye-infection and allergy? What if there is a bloodshot or a blood clot?
- Loffredo got his surgeries through non-medical professionals, who possibly wanted him as a client and hence never educated him on the rights and consequences of his extreme disfigurations? So many times a kidney transplant fails or a blood transfusion buries a person to death. So, what if his subdermal implants acquire infection leading him to medical amputation?
- How safe is his dental restructuring? Do you know that gum issues are a direct manifestation of poor heart and brain health?
- The stress and anxiety with each procedure, what kind of psychological toll will those have on his mental well-being? There will be negative interactions with society and every negative interaction has a whole potential to send him on a spiral that can branch out into stress and anxiety impacting his inner organs and their functioning.
- And finally, as this is not an active diagnosis and mere speculation, we need to understand that we all need a watch over us to not wait until things run down the drain. From this perspective, how far away does he stand from Body Integrity Identity Disorder or Apotemnophilia? Is he then an undiagnosed promoter of these rare mental health dissonances? Is he delusional to believe in aliens or is it just a strategic move to make a differential statement for earning a living as seen him modeling for fashion brands? Is he just pretending to be happy to put up with his irreversible modification? What is behind that “it takes courage,” given “alien” is not real, at least until we find an absolute trace beyond movies.
There are too many questions, which will baffle a lot of mental health professionals.
I would like to believe that despite this intense disfiguration and modification of his body, he retains a healthy brain with all clinical types of memories intact. I would like to believe that his entire modification is only a creative expression in a radical style and not a mental disorder in a conservative expression.
