Dublin psychiatrists have completed a study into vampirism after a man visited a hospital claiming that if he did not drink blood he would die.

The condition was brought into the public consciousness in the early 1990s when a 21-year-old Eastern European asked medical services for access to blood stocks as he did not want to hurt anybody. The condition is thought to be linked to schizophrenia.

Brendan Kelly, a consultant psychiatrist at the Mater Hospital, in Dublin’s city center, has studied the mental illness behind the condition of vampirism.  A study carried out by Kelly, and his colleague Seamus MacSuibhne, found that psychiatrists should engage more with their patients beliefs to be in with a chance of helping them.

Kelly, told the Sunday Times: “It is important that contemporary psychiatrists continue to seek to diagnose the type of mental illness that causes vampiric beliefs and to offer treatment....Helping these individuals, and their families, find some clue as to why they were drawn to a particular belief like vampirism can aid in their over all recovery.”

He continued “We looked at reports into vampirism stretching back hundreds of years and found interest in this subject matter has always been a feature in society.”