The psychiatric syndrome named after Dracula's fly-eating servant. Psychologist Richard Noll coined it in 1992 to satirize checklist psychiatry; it then escaped into television, textbooks, and peer-reviewed journals that cited it without the irony.
Documented
The documented coinage
Richard Noll's Vampires, Werewolves, and Demons (1992) tucked a few paragraphs into the book proposing Renfield's syndrome, named for Stoker's character: a childhood blood incident, then autovampirism, drinking one's own blood, then zoophagia, then true vampirism. The underlying literature is real: blood-drinking cases appear in psychiatric writing since Krafft-Ebing in 1892, and Vanden Bergh and Kelley published a review with new cases in 1964. Neither clinical vampirism nor Renfield's syndrome has ever appeared in the DSM or the ICD.
Assessment: Fully documented: the book, the paragraphs, the prior case literature, and the absence from both diagnostic manuals. The syndrome exists everywhere except where a syndrome would have to exist.
Stories
The escape
In 1994 an NBC Halloween segment presented the diagnostic criteria deadpan, delivered by Noll's colleague Leonard George; CSI and Criminal Minds wrote Renfield's syndrome into episodes; in 2011 Olry and Haines published a straight-faced working definition in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, and case reports folded the label into schizophrenia, paraphilia, and dissociative disorders. The joke had become infrastructure.
Assessment: Stories: the broadcast, the episodes, and the 2011 paper are all documented. What is documented equally is that no validating case series has ever been published under the name.
Interesting claims
The author's confession
Noll has said plainly that the syndrome was a deliberate parody of DSM checklist culture, invented late one night while writing: his target was psychiatry's habit of minting categories, and his summary diagnosis of the field's critics was that some people are just nuts and not everything can be categorized. He watched in public amusement, at a 2013 Penn State talk and in later interviews, as his satire accrued scholarly citations.
Assessment: Interesting: the rare interesting claim whose claimant, evidence, and confession are the same person. The file doubles as a control experiment for the whole archive: this is what it looks like when a claim's inventor tells you it is invented.
Sources and further reading
Noll, Vampires, Werewolves, and Demons: Twentieth Century Reports in the Psychiatric Literature (Brunner/Mazel, 1992)
Krafft-Ebing (1892) and Vanden Bergh and Kelley, Vampirism: A Review with New Observations, Archives of General Psychiatry (1964)
Olry and Haines, Renfield's Syndrome: A Psychiatric Illness Drawn from Bram Stoker's Dracula, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 20(4) (2011)
Noll's 2013 Penn State presentation and later interviews: the syndrome was a parody, I had created a monster
the absence of both labels from the DSM and ICD
Worth asking
If a parody diagnosis can earn peer-reviewed citations, what else in the manual started as somebody's joke?