A Bang On The Head

MARK GREENER explains how traumatic brain injury can change personality, creating serial killers and even vampires.

- Mark Greener

My favourite character in the Sixties Batman TV series is William Omaha McElroy. His origin may have seemed unlikely – a bang on the head transforms the mild-mannered Professor of Egyptology atYale University into the arch-villain King Tut, played with undisguised relish by Victor Buono – but psychotic and antisocial behaviour after head injuries is no joke. Bangs on the bonce have led to violent crime, serial killing and even a rather tragic case of vampirism.

A 38-year-old “neatly groomed” biological male “wearing female attire” went to an Emergency Department in Florida with a self-inflicted cut to her left forearm. She strongly denied self-harm. Rather she wanted to “fulfil a thirst for blood and flesh”. She told doctors that chewing the inside of her mouth until it bled usually satiated her desire for blood, but when she was especially distressed, this wasn’t enough. So she sliced her forearm with a hobby knife and “chewed the fat deposits, gnawed on it for a while and sucked it to try and get as much blood as possible”. She denied drinking the blood of animals or other humans.

She later told a psychiatrist that she experienced a traumatic brain injury – the medical term for a head injury – at 23 years of age while serving in the military. She had remained unconscious for three weeks. After waking, she started chewing the inside of her mouth to draw blood and, after her discharge, cut herself. Doctors diagnosed gender identity disorder when she was 31 years of age. But her desire to drink blood dated back to adolescence. She had avid interest in vampires, including True Blood, the Twilight Saga and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.