In 1993, Julio Lopes was sipping a coffee at a bar when he had a stroke. He fell into a coma, and two months later, when he regained consciousness, his body was fully paralyzed.
Doctors said the young man’s future was bleak: Save for his eyes, he would never be able to move again. Lopes would have to live with locked-in syndrome, a rare condition characterized by near-total paralysis of the body and a totally lucid mind. LIS is predominantly caused by strokes in specific brain regions; it can also be caused by traumatic brain injury, tumors, and progressive diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
Because LIS syndrome is rare, surveys of patients tend to be small, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Still, the vast majority of studies point in the same direction: A majority of locked-in patients are relatively happy. One early study, published in 2002, found that of 44 LIS patients, almost half reported their mood as good while 13 percent reported feeling depressed. A later study, published by [neurologist Steven] Laureys and his colleagues in 2011, found that of 65 patients, just over two-thirds considered themselves happy while less than one-third said they were unhappy. Seven percent of all patients expressed a wish for assisted dying.
