PARANOIA AND EXTREME MENTAL HEALTH IMPLICATIONS

The increased sense of anxiety that is commonly associated with bed bugs has also caused people to resort to unsafe and unhealthy measures to deal or cope with the bed bugs. The Ottawa Citizen documented a story of woman who had been suffering from anxiety and insomnia as a direct result of infestation of bed bugs. Her case of sensitivity to bed bugs was so severe that she had overdosed on sleeping pills as a means to commit suicide to alleviate the stress and psychosis associated with bed

bugs. The anxiety associated with bed bugs also has led people to sleep in their cars, offices, or other locations because they are afraid of the constant bites when they go to sleep at night. There have also been reports of people getting rid of, and not replacing, their furniture, of sleeping in tents in their homes after the bed bugs were eradicated, and of a nurse that slept in an intensive care unit to get away from bed bugs at home (her home took five treatments before the bed bugs were eliminated).

Newspaper stories document cases of paranoia following the discovery of bed bugs, and extreme and reckless reactions including a mother pouring diesel fuel on mattresses in order to kill the bugs, risking exposure to fumes and fire in the desperate effort to eliminate bed bugs. In one case, an apartment building caught on fire in Cincinnati due to a tenant using alcohol to treat an infestation.

Bed bugs are identified in connection with “delusory parasitosis” a psychological condition first described in the medical literature more than a century ago, in which the patient has an unwarranted belief that bed bugs are present on or in his body.