00:02 COMM: Chloe Jennings White spends he days
confined to a wheelchair.
It's tough to get around and she struggles with living in the world that isn't built
for the disabled.
However Chloe is actually able to walk perfectly, and chooses to live her life like a paraplegic,
due to a rare psychological disorder called BIID.
00:22 COMM: Despite wishing she was paralysed Chloe
still takes part in extreme sports like skiing.
00:27 COOM: BIID has led Chloe, a Cambridge University
educated research scientist, to harm herself in a bid to become paraplegic for real.
00:36 Chloe: I have fantasies about having a car
wreck, and becoming paraplegic from a car wreck.
00:42 COMM: Perhaps most shockingly of all, London
born Chloe is on a quest to find a surgeon willing to operate in order to paralyse her
legs forever.
00:50 Chloe: I did find a surgeon in another country
who would be prepared to do femoral and sciatic nerve transections to paralyse my legs.
It would be at least twenty five thousand dollars, and I don't have the money to do
it.
That's basically the only reason that I've not yet had surgery.
01:15 COMM: For her whole life Chloe has wished
more than anything that she was disabled.
01:20 Chloe: From about ten years old I somehow
got the idea to bandage my legs when I was home alone so nobody would know what I was
doing, I sort of fabricated a leg brace so that I couldn't bend my knee and walking around
like that felt "Oh wow, this is how it's supposed to be."
01:41 COMM: Chloe struggled to cope with her feelings.
01:44 Chloe: For a long time I had no idea why I
felt this way about my legs.
01:51 COMM: Chloe began to get real relief from
her condition when she started using the wheelchair full time in 2008.
01:58 Chloe: When you have BIID, the stress is really
intense.
The first few friends I told I would literally be shaking or, and crying even with emotion.
I was not really living a normal life before that, it was always in my mind, like, "I'm
supposed to be paralysed!"
02:18 COMM: But while Chloe pursues her quest to
have surgery that will leave her paraplegic, she loves taking part in her favourite past
time, downhill skiing.
02:27 Chloe: Skiing is essential to me and it has
a lot of benefits for me in terms of BIID.
I ski very aggressively, if it's a groomed run I will absolutely go as fast as I can.
My friends and family can get a little worried about me skiing sometimes because they know,
they know that I ski very aggressively, and y'know, they know it's in the back of my mind
that I actually want to get injured.
03:02 COMM: To deal with the anxiety BIID causes
her, Chloe sees psychotherapist, Dr. Mark Malan as often as she can.
03:09 Chloe: The problem that I run into is that
people make up these fantasies about BIID, it;s like they say, "Oh well, you're doing
it to get disability benefits, you're doing it to get attention" and then you say "No,
that's not it" and they'll come up with another fantasy of theirs.
03:29 Dr. Malan: So it sounds like, just misunderstanding
that a lot of what you're having to do is educate people about it.
03:35 Chloe: Oh education yeah.
03:37 COMM: Dr. Malan says BIID is actually very
real.
03:40 Dr. Malan: It's a psychological disorder that
people have, where they desire to have some sort of body modification, but it's a sense
that a person really wants to lose some sort of ability that they have.
03:57 COMM: And like other BIID sufferers, Chloe's
illness has worrying symptoms.
04:01 Chloe: I have to admit any time I'm driving
I sort of conjure up accident scenarios in my mind where I would become paraplegic.
04:12 COMM: In 2009, Chloe really did crash, surviving
a horrific seventy five mile per hour double roll over.
04:19 Chloe: One of the things that was in my mind,
after the car wreck was dId I do this deliberately in order to um, y'know, be paraplegic?
04:33 Chloe: I couldn't say for sure at that time
that I had not done it deliberately because I simply had no memory of, that.
04:44 COMM: Chloe's attempts to injure her legs
mean many of her friends and loved ones worry about her.
Like Dave Allen, a hiking buddy.
04:51 Dave: It's scary for all of her friends y'know,
including myself that y'know if she does, y'know, she runs a huge risk that she could
die doing some of the stuff she's done in the past
05:00 COMM: Despite her love of skiing and the challenges
of confined to a wheelchair, Chloe is still determined to have surgery that will render
her paralysed.
05:09 Chloe: When I have that surgery I just know,
it will be the happiest day of my life.