All her life, Michelle Myers has spoken in her native American accent. The morning after a severe headache, she mysteriously woke up speaking in a British accent.
It's been two years since and the 45-year-old mom from Buckeye, Arizona still hasn't gone back to her original American accent.
American Woman Develops British Accent Overnight
Myers, who is a former beauty queen, has never even left the United States, which makes her sudden switch to a British accent all the more odd.
"Everybody only sees or hears Mary Poppins," Myers tells ABC affiliate KNXV. "They send in the psychiatrist at the hospital and make sure you're not a loon."
It's not the first time this has happened to the mother of seven. The first time it happened, she went to bed with a headache and woke up with an Irish accent. The second time it was an Australian accent.
Both prior incidents only lasted for a week, but this third occurrence is stretching out indefinitely.
What's Going On?
Myers' strange tendency of waking up with a completely new accent is actually a case of a rare but legitimate speech disorder known as Foreign Accent Syndrome.
According to the University of Texas at Dallas, FAS is often caused by damage to the brain from a stroke or brain injury. Other conditions have also been linked to it such as multiple sclerosis and conversion disorder. In some cases, no clear cause are identified.
After Myers' many medical consultations, she's been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a group of disorders affecting the connecting tissue in the skin, bones, and blood vessels, among other organs and tissues, according to the NIH website. This condition, doctors tell Myers, may have turned her accent British.
Multiple cases of FAS have been recorded all over the world with patients switching accents from Japanese to Korean, British English to French, American English to British English, and Spanish to Hungarian.
Experiencing FAS is difficult, according to Myers, who says that she feels as if she's a different person compared to who she was before she switched to a new accent.
More than anything, the Arizonian mother hopes that people who undergo FAS are taken seriously moving forward.
"Some people think it's physiological; others think it's psychological," she says in KNXV. "People like me — we don't care which one it is. We just really want to be taken seriously and if it is something that's going to hurt me, help me."
