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Oct 13, 2025  |  
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 | Remer,MN
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NextImg:Playing the Face Card

Source: Bigstock

It was World Mental Health Day last Friday and, to celebrate, I decided to acquire a fashionable mental illness all my very own. To my surprise, I found I already had one.

During my research, I discovered a recent report into a hitherto obscure wrong-in-the-head disease called “prosopagnosia,” or “face blindness,” which revealed to me the probable true reason I frequently fail to recognize people in the street when I unexpectedly encounter them out of context: I’m not just being rude, I have an officially validated medical condition. At last! I can consider myself a member of an oppressed minority group! Apparently, the malady affects numerous celebrities, too, like Brad Pitt, Stephen Fry, and various other persons I wouldn’t necessarily be able to identify in a police lineup, had they just stabbed me.

One time, my own cousin knocked on my door to deliver me a parcel. As I hadn’t seen him for a while and had no idea he had unexpectedly become a mailman in the interim, I simply thought he was another generic interchangeable unknown meat unit in a postal service uniform and merely politely thanked him without so much as saying hello by name. He thought I was deliberately blanking him for some unknown reason, but in reality I was just deeply cognitively confused.

The situation was then made even more perplexing by the fact there used to be another man who lived on the same housing estate who looked exactly like me, and even wore a similar coat and glasses, to the extent that once my own mother stopped her car in the street to offer him a lift. Knowledge of my doppelgänger’s existence becoming known, it then led to an awkward potential situation in which people were unsure whether, when they walked past either me or him in town, the total lack of response was due to him not being me, or due to me retardedly not recognizing them again. There ought to be some kind of great, absurdist, Feydeau-style comic farce in there somewhere for some enterprising playwright with brain enough to plot it out.

“Another subject of the study almost found themselves on the end of an accidental racial discrimination lawsuit.”

Faceless Academics
The new prosopagnosia study, in the academic journal PLOSOne, features interesting details, such as that many prosopagnosics (the rather awkward technical medical term for sufferers) have a specific problem in recognizing people out of context: Seeing my cousin in my cousin’s house, in his usual civilian clothes, I would have recognized him immediately, but seeing him delivering the post, in a postman’s uniform, he may as well have been wearing a burka or a beekeeping helmet.

Patients develop compensatory coping strategies to help them successfully spot people, such as noting it is unlikely two separate individuals would each have a large tattoo of a flaming blood-drenched swastika on their chin, so the next lady they see sporting one is probably still Linda from Accounts after all, but others want legislatively guaranteed help from the State to prevent their lifelong litany of minor social embarrassments from continuing to occur.

Admittedly, there can sometimes be serious consequences to the condition; some badly affected children, unable to recognize their own parents, have occasionally attempted to go home with the wrong adults after approaching the wrong ones at the school gates. If said wrong adult happens to be called Big Brown Hassan from Afghanistan, and the child called Little White Sammie from Rotherham, that could have some pretty serious consequences. Then again, if your genuine parent happens to be Josef Fritzl or Jeffrey Epstein, maybe the mistake may accidentally do you some good.

Another subject of the study almost found themselves on the end of an accidental racial discrimination lawsuit:

“I was accused by an [Asian or black] ex-boyfriend of being racist because I didn’t recognise him when I bumped into him unexpectedly in the street, and he said ‘I suppose we all look the same to you.’ This was pre-diagnosis, I didn’t know what prosopagnosia was, so I didn’t have a reply, and just felt awful because I thought he must be right.”

I know how the poor woman must have felt at this point. To me, there’s only one single man who lives in China, it’s just that there are 750 million of him. People who look similar to one another do cause me problems, I must admit.

Face the Truth
Yet, in truth, the above extreme examples notwithstanding, the main and most common negative practical effect of prosopagnosia is to cause sufferers the fleeting discomfiture of temporarily feeling as if they may be inhabiting an episode of a low-quality 1970s sitcom based upon an intermittent series of unlikely and rib-tickling misunderstandings, like a shit Fawlty Towers for spastics.

For many blasé patients whose own dose of the disease is mild and intermittent, like myself, it is simply not considered a serious thing, certainly not the kind of matter they would ever dream of bothering an actual doctor about. What would such a consultation even look like? “Doctor, I can’t recognize faces properly anymore!” “I know, I’m the cleaner.” It’s not as if there’s a cure.

Several patients canvassed for the PLOSOne study cheerfully admitted the neurological quirk caused them “no major challenges in their life,” unlike those born with more serious conditions like having no legs or being dead. As one interviewee said, “I tend not to think of it as a disability, more an eccentricity.” Another, when asked if the problem deserved further investigation, replied, “I don’t think it’s necessary.” Maybe he also had cancer and thought that, all things considered, that really ought to be the greater medical research priority here. In our current age, such a sensibly phlegmatic attitude now counts as being a virtual heresy, though.

Unfortunately, some of the more hysterical, loud, and self-entitled prosopagnospazzers (a much better new term of my own devising) appear to feel distinctly otherwise; for them, the term “face value” is just a synonym for “disability compensation.” Supposedly, there are now 1.2 million people with the malady walking around staring in total incomprehension at the yellow and the slitty-eyed, which works out as one in every fifty individuals here in the U.K., a figure I simply don’t believe. Do they have that many total diagnosed sufferers in the entire continents of Africa and Asia combined, I wonder? Probably not, because over there they don’t have anything like the absurdly overgenerous social security welfare benefits systems that we do over here.

The condition being presently so little-known, when you mention it to them, many ordinary people understandably think it is made-up, as with other equally outlandish (but absolutely real) neurological and genetic flaws like Foreign Accent Syndrome or being Belgian. Perhaps in certain instances it is indeed just made-up. I can’t help but feel some face-blindies, authentic or otherwise, are only angling for unnecessary and undeserved sympathy when broadcasting their “tragic” symptoms to all and sundry. Some even claim to be unable to recognize their own selves when looking into a mirror. Who else is it going to be?

The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits
Predictably, an entire campaign is now afoot to get face blindness formally designated as a legally recognized “hidden disability” like autism, hypotension, or homosexuality, which may then allow congenital people-confusers to access free easy money vital disability benefits payments checks from the government.

Others demand that personnel departments be compelled to provide all staff members with expensive and time-wasting neurodiversity training in dealing with prosopagnosia sensitively in the workplace, such as the “need” to provide sufferers with employee seating plans for them to forensically examine before every team meeting. Yet others call for absurd mitigating measures to be taken by all normies, at all times, such as forcing them to begin wandering around with permanent name badges stuck to their chests, or opening EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE THEY EVER SAY with the preliminary clause “Hello, my name is X,” so spam-heads like me can immediately know who they are.

Why not just legally decree that every citizen must perforce get a large-print ID-number tattoo and linking QR code on their foreheads, and be done with it? Maybe every time I see someone half-familiar in the street, I should be given the legal right to cry, “Papers, please!” in a German accent and be entitled to be shown their passport?

Ultimately, there’s only so much any normative society can reasonably do to adapt to those abnormal citizens forced to live uneasily within it. Things like wheelchair access ramps, or verbal captions for the deaf on TVs, seem perfectly judicious and practical adaptations for any humane society to make, but not forcing everyone to walk around 24 hours a day with a big sandwich board saying “I AM CLAUDIA” on it, just to make the supposed one in fifty squinting weirdos with prosopagnosia feel a bit better about themselves. Sometimes the abnormal just have to accept the need to fit in with the normal.

Except, these days, highly restrictive employment laws designed to facilitate “accessibility” and “diversity” in the workplace now dictate the precise opposite—with the inevitable end result that some small-to-medium businesses, unable to absorb the cost of being able to comply with such proposed rules, should they ever actually come to pass, will simply end up going to the wall and closing down forever.

That’s true “equality” for you: unemployment for all, just like in the Great Depression! But then, say the words “Great Depression” nowadays, and a pandering doctor will just jump out of the nearest bush and immediately provide you with a free long-term sick note to help you get over the whole thing, particularly on World Mental Health Day.

Those supposedly “seriously disabled” people who hold such pathetically needy and demanding attitudes about their fairly minor medico-mental defect in life should be forced to look these facts straight in the face and made to recognize them for once. If they can.