Reports of self-inflicted eye injuries are rare in the United States. This may be due to the infrequency of such occurrences here or may reflect the difficulty often experienced in establishing such a diagnosis.
The patient described is thought to be of particular interest because she dramatically illustrates how elusive the diagnosis of self-mutilation may be. Furthermore, she demonstrated several types of lesions in one eye, as well as functional ocular disease, and the loss of the other eye was due to an unknown, inadequately explained, inflammatory process.
Report of a Case
The patient, a 34-year-old white, unmarried woman, who worked as a packer in a glass factory, was admitted to the National Institutes of Health with a large ulceration on the inferior nasal tarsal and bulbar conjunctiva of the left eye.Twenty years prior to admission she developed symptoms of photophobia, lacrimation, and irritation involving the right eye, accompanied