Have you ever gotten the distinct impression that you were a dead person?  Have you ever felt as if you were immortal, and that death had already claimed you the only time that it could ever do so?  Or perhaps you have felt as if you had lost your blood, or your internal organs.  If any of these is the case, you just might be suffering from the Cotard delusion.  This is a nasty little mental illness in which a person believes that they have died, or that some part of them that is vital to their continued life has been removed from their body.  While it is a little bit strange, the entire notion can make sense under its own twisted context.

Consider the possibility that a person might believe themselves to be dead, after they have recently suffered through (and gotten over) a serious type of illness.  In those kinds of scenarios, a person may actually come to believe that, instead of getting over what had previously been wrong with them, they had succumbed to it in some manner or another.  Perhaps they had gotten AIDS, or maybe they had died of some common cause that afflicts the people who have had what they had.  The common theme that underlies this is that they have died, and that everything that has come after this occurrence must be something which is dealing with their spirit and its interaction with the spirit world.

A lot of people believe that bad things are going to happen, but the Cotard delusion is one of the strangest things that a person can honestly think.  To them, the idea that they might still be walking around, despite having lost their internal organs or blood (and despite not having the scars which would probably have been needed for such a process to have taken place) is completely logical and realistic.  It could lead to a whole lot of interesting conversations.