The accusations and suggested explanations have been many from the disbelieving skeptics over the years. Liar, fraud, attention seeking, narcissistic, fat, sexually manipulative, and delusional. You have to expect a welcome like that when you enter the skeptical community as what they lovingly term a woo. Their favorite insult by which to try to dismiss me always changes, as one becomes disproven they find another, not considering that perhaps what I am doing is just a harmless investigation into an interesting experience of health perceptions whose accuracy is in fact higher than it should be able to be.

Their favorite now once again is mentally ill and delusional. Even though I have already described my health perceptions and investigation to a psychiatrist who thought nothing of it, and a professor who specializes in human perception who thought it was interesting and not a reason for concern. Recent attempts at trying to dismiss me again by these allegations have led me to choose to speak with a psychiatrist about my health perceptions to settle the matter once and for all.

Someone in the Swedish skeptical forum Local staff and the help wanted to test Paranormal (see pages three and four, and note that this represents an automated English translation) did not consider my response adequate to their question "What help have you sought to exclude mental illness?", where I said (also in that thread):

First of all the experience itself of images that depict body and health is not the case of a mental illness. Other than these images which I am now investigating through skeptical tests, I also experience synesthesia. When I look at numbers or physics equations I experience them in color and shape. Synesthesia is an experience of a sensory experience which is not based in reality, but rather that something you take in from reality is automatically translated into information depicted by a different sense. For instance a real image becomes an unreal feeling. Synesthesia is not defined as a mental illness, rather it is useful and often leads both to enhanced creativity and learning capabilities. I consider my experiences of seeing images that depict body and health to belonging to the same category as synesthesia, and their mere occurrence as such is therefore not a sign of mental illness. You also have to look at how I behave with my experience. I don't experience my images as part of reality. My sense of reality otherwise is entirely normal and the same as everyone else's, it is just that in addition to that I experience internal images and sensations, and these images which I am investigating belong to the same category of personal as opposed to reality, as the things that you feel when you listen to music or gaze into art. It is something one knows is one's own, personal, and entirely synthetic. In addition I do nothing immoral with my images. I never tell people of the health images I see of them, unless it is with a skeptic who has agreed to allow an evaluation of the correlation of my images with them. I do not practice psychic readings, I do not even say that I'd be psychic. The most recent person I actually read was none other than Michael Shermer! I had a depression last year and was seeing a psychiatrist several times, and I even described my images and that I am investigating these, but I was never given any other diagnosis other than depression. However we never went into detail about my images, but the images as well as what I am doing with this has been mentioned and described to a psychiatrist who thought nothing in particular of it. In addition I have also spoken with a psychology professor who specializes in human perception, I described to her the images I have and the investigation I am doing, and her comment was that it was interesting and that it reminded her of synesthesia and she encouraged me to investigate further, not to seek psychiatric help. Of course I am also interested in the physiological and mental aspect of my experience, I am researching this from all angles. Its origin, not only manifestations, also interest me, and so I intend to discuss this in more detail with psychiatrists or researchers of the brain and mental. However I first want to build a stronger foundation in the investigation before bothering scientists or specialists, but one of my ultimate goals is to one day get to have a brain scan that shows what parts of my brain are activated as I am experiencing my perceptions. A brain scan would in fact show if what I am experiencing is a hallucination (specific areas of the brain would then be activated in a characteristic pattern) or if I am in fact processing visual or felt information or other. That would be interesting.

And a recent thread in the stopvisionfromfeeling.com website has comments such as,
"I also write here because as a person with a diagnosed personality disorder it worries me that she says on her website that she doesn't think she is mentally ill because she doesn't 'feel' mentally ill."

"I say all this because as a person with mental health issues, it worries me greatly that this woman who is clearly mentally ill is not having treatment"

"has any effort been made by anyone (school/friends) to contact her family?"

"Could the police do anything as she is clearly a danger in my opinion".

And then desertgal goes on to say,
"more than 200 people have noted that they believe Anita is suffering from some type of delusional/narcissistic personality disorder and, indeed, her behavior is consistent with the textbook description of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. But Anita doesn't "feel mentally ill" so she completely disregards any of that input. She doesn't want to take it seriously, because she is "entitled to the way she feels", so she won't."

I will speak about the medical perceptions and investigation with a psychiatrist. The discussions would be dedicated to my experience of health perceptions and that I am seeing reason to investigate those with a series of skeptical tests. Furthermore - and here's the kicker - I can audio record the discussions and make them available here.

If not in this first talk, another one will be dedicated entirely for the assessment whether I have narcissistic disorder. Skeptics like to use this accusation as a form of insult that they feel can be dressed as being kindly intended and justified, but I seriously do not have its symptoms. Narcissist is the appropriate insult to use for a woo who won't go away, with a claim that did not go away after two skeptical tests. The at-home, internet-based amateur-level skeptics (to distinguish them from real skeptics who are more than just opinionated people, and actually make a contribution to the skeptical community and are highly regarded) see me as the sole representative of all of woo, I am their Sylvia Browne John Edward because I come from the world of woo and dare to say hey and enter the world of skeptics. I am fought with every tactics and all of the resentment against all the wrongs of woo are taken out on me, turning to the use of accusations of mental illness when all else fails to try to insult me by.

Update February 2011: I have come across a doctor of psychiatry who is willing to discuss my paranormal claim and experience of medical perceptions and for us to record our conversations and to post them here. It should be interesting! Expect to see it here within the next few months.