Clinical Lycanthropy: When Your Brain Insists You're Turning Into A Wolf

Of course, there’s a reason we only see this kind of thing on the silver screen: werewolves aren’t real. Except, that is, when they are – because, for a handful of people out there, this kind of extreme bodily experience is oh-so-real. At least, to them.

It’s called clinical lycanthropy – and honestly? It’s terrifying.

A rare lunacy

Werewolvery, as the Oxford English Dictionary certainly does not call it, is far from a new condition – but you might be surprised at how people in ye olden days really saw it. Rather than real-life supernatural villains, supposed “werewolves” have, perhaps surprisingly, always been understood as having a psychological disorder – even before we really had the vocabulary to describe it as such.

Indeed, the Romans rejected the idea that humans could literally change into wolves: “That men have been turned into wolves, and again restored to their original form, we must confidently look upon as untrue,” advised Pliny the Elder in his 77 CE work Natural History, “unless, indeed, we are ready to believe all the tales, which, for so many ages, have been found to be fabulous.” Medieval and Renaissance physicians followed suit, with supposed “werewolves” being treated quite… well, tenderly, all things considered.

Take the report from early 16th-century Spain, for example, of a man “around 30 years of age, who had been found wandering the streets at night, howling in cemeteries and eating whatever he could find, who had been arrested and then sent to a pauper asylum,” writes Jan Dirk Blom, Professor of Clinical Psychopathology at the University of Leiden and something of an expert on clinical lycanthropy, in his most recent paper on the subject with co-author Brian Sharpless.

“Citing Galen and Avicenna, the treating physician appeared to have realized immediately that he was dealing with a special type of melancholia called insania lupina,” the pair explain, “and treated the man accordingly with then prevailing techniques […] The case description ends with the almost endearing words that the patient was ‘instructed thus that the disease would not return; not only he, but also a person close to him and in charge of this task, so that every month he would take some simple and mild medicine that would ward off the melancholia’.”

It was in 1853, however, that we get our first modern, biomedical description of a case of clinical lycanthropy. It was then that the French alienist Bénédict Augustin Morel – “alienist” being what we would now refer to as a psychiatrist – reported the condition of a man convinced he had turned into a wolf, presenting his teeth and feet as what he thought was proof of the transformation. “The case was described in biomedical jargon, and no one but the man himself (addressed as a ‘patient’ by Morel) believed that he had actually assumed an animal form,” write Blom and Sharpless.

Cases have been few and far between since then. It’s impossible to say how many cases of clinical lycanthropy are out there – though people have certainly tried – but the consensus seems to be about 25, at least for those recorded in the medical literature. That gives an average of about one patient every seven years; clinical lycanthropy is, says Natasha Sigala, Professor of Neuroscience at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, “exceptionally rare.”

What we can say with confidence is that it is one of the rarest syndromes in psychiatry.

 Natasha Sigala

But exactly how rare is a question that we’ll probably never know the answer to. “It is likely that some cases go unreported,” Sigala explains, “or are subsumed within broader psychiatric diagnoses without the specific delusional content being recorded.”

“The true prevalence is unknown,” she tells IFLScience. “What we can say with confidence is that it is one of the rarest syndromes in psychiatry.”

The experience of a werewolf

Werewolf transformations are rarely comfortable. In myths and legends, folk tales and literature, even in modern movies and spicy BookTok recs, the change from human to canid is usually marked by cries of anguish and writhing in pain.

There’s a good reason for that, and it’s probably not the one you’re thinking of. Sure, the physical sensations of a body’s bones and muscles shifting and transforming within minutes would be agonizing – but that’s surely nothing a little mythical fantasy couldn’t take care of. In truth, the reason the transformation so often needs to hurt is not necessarily so literal: rather, it symbolizes the psychological pain of losing one’s innocence, or forcefully breaking out of humanity’s self-imposed morality.

Patients sometimes find the transformation belief confirmed when looking in a mirror, seeing their reflection as altered or monstrous.

Natasha Sigala

For those with clinical lycanthropy, this connection can work in reverse. “The werewolf, as a cultural figure, carries strong associations with moral transgression, loss of control, violence, and self-disgust,” explains Sigala – “and this often resonates with how patients feel about themselves.”

“Several documented cases describe patients who are overwhelmed by feelings of guilt, contamination, or evilness, and who experience the transformation belief as a kind of symbolic expression of those feelings,” Sigala, who co-authored a 2023 case report on a patient with the condition, tells IFLScience. “The emotional content is typically one of profound distress.”

Indeed, the whole thing sounds kind of hellish to go through. “The experience varies between individuals, but there are some recurring features,” Sigala explains. “Many patients report strange and deeply unsettling bodily sensations – perceiving changes in their facial structure, unusual hair growth, alterations in their musculature or teeth – which they interpret as evidence of physical transformation. Some experience these as hallucinations; in others, particularly those with an underlying neurological condition, there may be actual changes in physical sensation or movement that become distorted in perception and interpretation.”

“Patients sometimes find the transformation belief confirmed when looking in a mirror, seeing their reflection as altered or monstrous,” she says.

Wolves aren’t the only animal people might find themselves “becoming”. Tales abound of Japanese kitsune, Ethiopian buda, British kelpies, and so on; case reports, meanwhile, are equally as varied, with more than two-thirds of the 77 examples of clinical therianthropy found in the medical literature by Blom and Sharpless involving animals other than wolves.

Pity, for example, the poor individual who found themselves transforming into a bee; the patient who presented with clinical gyrinanthropy, meaning they saw themselves as a tadpole, or their compatriot with clinical gerbillanthropy, which we’ll let you figure out on your own. These conditions could last for days, if you’re lucky – more likely, however, you would be experiencing this weird, intense trauma for months or even years on end.

Modern wolfsbane

When that Spanish physician treated his melancholic patient, he did so with the most up-to-date methods he knew: enemas, bloodletting, healthful baths, and so on. Thankfully, modern treatments are a little less visceral.

“Clinical lycanthropy is not a standalone diagnosis,” explains Sigala. Instead, it’s what’s known as  a transnosographic syndrome: “it cuts across several different underlying conditions rather than belonging to any one of them,” she tells IFLScience.

To perceive yourself as transforming into a wolf – or indeed any animal – could be a symptom of any number of psychological and neurological conditions. It’s been reported in patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, psychotic depression, bipolar disorder with psychotic features, and epilepsy; in the case report Sigala consulted on, it was a manifestation of Huntingdon’s disease. We should “think of it as a particular flavour that a psychotic episode can take,” Sigala explains, “rather than a disease category in itself.”

Treatment, therefore, should be equally individualized. Rather than curing the lycanthropy itself, it’s the underlying condition that needs to be dealt with: “lycanthropic content tells us something important about what the patient is experiencing,” Sigala tells IFLScience, “but it does not change the diagnostic category.”

The first port of call is usually antipsychotic medication, she explains, with antidepressants or mood stabilizers added as needed. For treatment-resistant cases – such as the Huntingdon’s case she worked on – a more powerful antipsychotic, clozapine, is used.

The good news, among all this body-horror and tragedy, is the end result: “in the majority of documented cases it has led to full or partial remission of the transformation delusion,” Sigala confirms. So, while we can’t personally attest to the efficacy of bloodletting and enemas to cure psychosis, we’d probably take the clozapine instead.

Correction (April 8, 2026): The affiliation and title for Professor Sigala were previously stated incorrectly. This has now been corrected to Professor of Neuroscience at Brighton and Sussex Medical School and the institutional URL updated.