7 real but weird disorders

1. Pica – fifty cents worth of mixed wing nuts, please

You’ve heard of anorexia and bulimia. Well, pica is an eating disorder where people eat weird things like: dirt, glass, sand, wire, hair, faeces, lead, plastic, chalk, wood, coal, string and needles. (My dog, Nellie, clearly has pica.)

2. Alien hand syndrome – get your hand off it

This is a rare disorder where even though you can feel sensation in your hand, it feels possessed by a force outside your control. (This often happens to me when I’m passing the cookie jar.) The condition is also called Dr Strangelove syndrome for obvious reasons.

3. Foreign accent syndrome – I'm French. Why do think I have this outrageous accent, you silly king

If you have foreign accent syndrome, you suddenly and unexpectedly develop a foreign accent. (My dad does this every time he talks to my Dutch grandmother. Does this count?)

This may not be a fatal disorder (nobody ever died of sounding Chinese), but sufferers need to get used to their new accent or may employ speech therapy to help their speech revert.

4. Alice in Wonderland syndrome – eat me

This condition distorts visual perception so that close objects appear disproportionately tiny, as though viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. It’s usually temporary – the syndrome is associated with migraines, so perhaps when he wrote about Alice, Lewis Carroll was describing his own experiences with these headaches (or maybe he just ate one too many special mushrooms.)

5. Ondine's curse – the girl leaves him breathless

Ondine’s Curse victims can’t breathe spontaneously but must consciously will each breath. They suffocate if they fall asleep.

Ondine's Curse borrows its name from the legend of Ondine, a water nymph, who fell in love with a human, thereby forfeiting her immortality. Though he promised his undying love, Ondine found him asleep in another woman’s arms. As he had pledged to love Ondine with every waking breath, she cursed him so that he would die the moment he fell asleep.

6. Hypertrichosis – the folically well-endowed

People with hypertrichosis have hair growing all over their bodies – including their eyelids. Even their ears can sprout long curls (and I thought my partner needed a nose and ear hair trimmer). Some sufferers have a hairy little appendage called a faun tail. These folks have always attracted enormous interest, especially as sideshow stars.

7. Genital retraction syndrome – penis panic

Victims of genital retraction syndrome become convinced that their genitals are disappearing into their bodies. It can be contagious, sparking off ‘penis panics’, such as the one that overtook Singapore in 1967 in which thousands of men became convinced that their penises were being stolen. The story was contained by a complete media blackout.

Often blamed on witchcraft, it's thought to be an extreme overreaction to normal genital shrinking from cold or other causes.

Image: Engraving scanned from an original book dated 1866, this is a line art illustration by John Tenniel from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.