People who suffer with Morgellons have numerous sores on their skin, which resist healing, and which have unusual fibers that grow out of the sores. The fibers can be blue, red, white, or clear. Sometimes small crystal-like granules appear in the sores as well as tiny objects resembling worms or insects. The sores are painful. People report feeling like something is crawling on or under their skin. They report stinging, burning, and itching sensations in the skin. The fibers can sometimes be seen under the surface of the skin prior to their breaking through the skin. This is then followed by the formation of a new skin lesion.          

The fibers are considered to be the definitive symptom for diagnosing this disease. However, in addition to the fibers and the weeping-scabby sores that can appear anywhere on the body, people experience unexplained fatigue, short-term memory loss, and brain fog. (Brain fog can be described as an impaired ability to make quick and well thought out decisions as compared with one’s former ability to think and reason.)

Some people with Morgellons have been diagnosed with ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, or other psychiatric diagnoses. A significant number have neurologic impairments, including Multiple Sclerosis, ALS, and other neuropathies        The experience of feeling like  bugs are crawling under the skin, combined with painful, itching, and burning sores that will not heal, produces various emotional reactions.  There can be a real sense of panic, caused by the intensity of the skin sensations, the disfigurement of the skin, and by the appearance of new lesions, which are spreading over large sections of the body.      

As far as all the other symptoms — fatigue, impaired mental functioning, stinging pain, burning, itching, constipation, and various intense emotional reactions, these are somehow all seen as aspects of a mental illness, which can be treated with medications designed for people diagnosed with psychosis. They are considered to be psychotic, because some people who are psychotic experience intense itching in the skin and report sensation like something is crawling under or on their skin. So, as soon as a Morgellons sufferer reports such skin related sensations, physicians immediately conclude the person is crazy and needs psychiatric treatment. [3]

Branded as crazy by conventional doctors, Morgellons sufferers search for effective treatments to manage their symptoms and continue to hope for a complete cure. Friends and even family members often reject people with Morgellons, because they believe the diagnosis given by conventional medicine practitioners who insist that Morgellons is a disease of the mind. They stand firm in the belief that the Morgellons skin sores are either the result of self-destructive behavior or nothing more than insect bites.    

In other words, many physicians and scientists believe that people with Morgellons are so deluded that they won’t even participate in psychiatric treatment.

Those who have Morgellons clearly know that they have a physical illness, which few physicians are willing or able to identify. Very few people with Morgellons have any history of mental illness and they functioned normally in their families and careers until the sores, fibers, pain, and disability appeared. They have no reason to believe they are mentally ill and they do what any sane person would do, they avoid psychiatric treatment when it is clear that their illness is physical in origin. Yet, from the point of view of dermatology and psychiatry, this avoidance is seen as a sign of their mental illness.