Amazing Story Of A Gunshot Wound Healing A Mental Illness Resurfaces On Reddit After 25 Years

This morning Richard Hall of The Independent tweeted: "Reddit is great for digging up decades-old news stories that blow your mind."

He linked to a New York Times story from February 25, 1998, that detailed a 19-year-old man with obsessive-compulsive disorder who shot himself in the head in a suicide attempt and ended up curing the mental illness without causing any other brain damage.

The patient, "George," had dropped out of school and quit his job because he washed his hands hundreds of times a day and took frequent showers.

From the Times:

''George was also very depressed and told his mother that his life was so wretched that he would rather die,'' Dr. Solyom related. ''She said, 'So look George, if your life is so wretched, just go and shoot yourself.' So George went to the basement, stuck a .22-caliber rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.''

The bullet lodged in the left front lobe of the brain. Surgeons removed it but could not get out all the fragments.

''When he was transferred to our hospital three weeks later, he had hardly any compulsions left,'' Dr. Solyom said.

Over the following five years, George got a job and became a straight-A college student, according to the study in Physician's Weekly, a British journal of psychiatry.