What Is Morgellons? Singer Joni Mitchell Battles Mystery Illness

Joni Mitchell, 71, was taken to a hospital in Los Angeles on Tuesday after she was found unconscious at her Los Angeles home. In recent years, the singer has complained of a number of health problems, including one particularly unusual ailment: Morgellons disease.

People who believe they have the condition report lesions that don’t heal, “fibers” extruding from their skin and uncomfortable sensations like pins-and-needles tingling or stinging. Sufferers may also report fatigue and problems with short-term memory and concentration.

But Morgellons is not a medically accepted diagnosis. Scientists have struggled for nearly a decade to find a cause and have come up mostly empty-handed.

Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied 115 people who said they had the condition. In a report published in 2012, they said they were unable to identify an infectious source for the patients’ “unexplained dermopathy.” There was no evidence of an environmental link, and the “fibers” from patients resembled those from clothing that had gotten trapped in a scab or crusty skin.

The investigators cast doubt on Morgellons as a distinct condition and said that it might be something doctors were already familiar with: delusional infestation, a psychiatric condition characterized by an unshakable but erroneous belief that one’s skin is infested with bugs or parasites.

Drug use can contribute to such delusions, and the investigators noted evidence of drug use — prescription or illicit — in half of the people they examined. Of the 36 participants who completed neuropsychological testing, 11 percent had high scores for depression, and 63 percent, unsurprisingly, were preoccupied with health issues.

These patients have a reduced quality of life, the researchers concluded, but the cause is not clear. Science one day may find that Morgellons has a physical basis, but at the moment most experts treat it as a psychiatric disorder — to the great frustration of people, like Ms. Mitchell, who feel they are afflicted with it.