Clinical lycanthropy

Clinical lycanthropy is a rare psychiatric syndrome in which a person holds the delusion that they can turn into an animal, have already turned into one, or are one. The name borrows from lycanthropy, the mythical affliction in which humans are said to physically shapeshift into wolves, and the folklore is the origin of the label rather than a description of anything that happens to the body. Strictly the term means turning into a wolf, but present-day researchers use it for a broad range of animal transformations. In earlier periods a transformation into an animal other than a wolf was commonly called zoanthropy. In the medical literature the condition is therefore a disturbance of belief and self-perception, recorded as a syndrome and not as a physical change.