Gale Ridge could tell something was wrong as soon as the man walked into her office at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. He was smartly dressed in a collared shirt and slacks, but his skin didn't look right: It was bright pink, almost purple — and weirdly glassy.
Without making eye contact, he sat hunched in the chair across from Ridge and began to speak. He was an internationally renowned physician and researcher. He had taught 20 years' worth of students, treating patients all the while, and had solved mysteries about the body's chemistry and how it could be broken by disease. But now, he was having health issues he didn't know how to deal with.
"He was being eaten alive by insects," Ridge, an entomologist, recalled recently. "He described these flying entities that were coming at him at night and burrowing into his skin."
Their progeny, too, he said, seemed to be inside his flesh. He'd already seen his family doctor and dermatologist. He'd hired an exterminator to no avail. He had tried Epsom salts, vinegar, medication. So he took matters into his own hands, filling his bathtub with insecticide and clambering in for some relief.
But even that wasn't working. The biting, he said, would begin again. Ridge tried her best to help. "What I did was talk to him, explaining the different biologies of known arthropods that can live on people … trying to get him to understand that what he is seeing is not biologically known to science," she said.
She saw him only four or five times. Three weeks after he first walked into her office, she heard that he was dead. Heart attack, the obituaries declared. No mention of invisible bugs, psychological torment, self-mutilation. But the entomologist was convinced that wasn't the whole story.
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https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/22/insect-delusional-parasitosis-entomology/?
