In a class discussion about the philosophy of mind, a student who was a nurse once told me a sad story about her husband. When he was a teenager on a lark he went to a fortune-teller. She looked at his palm and announced that he was going to have a happy married life. After a slight pause, she then added that he was going to die when he was thirty-five years old. On his thirty-fifth birthday, the nurse’s husband keeled over dead. An autopsy uncovered no physical cause of his death; he was perfectly healthy. The only explanation is that his belief that he was going to die on that day killed him.
This apparently is a widely reported phenomenon. There is a book by J.C. Barker, MD, Scared to Death: An Examination of Fear, Its Causes and Effects. The main shocking point of this book is that people of all ages and cultures, people, moreover, in perfect health, die because they believe their time has come, as predicted by someone or implied by some oracle or sign. How the ‘mere’ belief that one is going to die may cause a perfectly healthy person to die cries out for explanation.
First, it should be noted that according to Barker, at the time of publication of his book in Britain (1968), public interest and use of fortune-tellers, mediums and psychics was popular and widespread. People try all sorts of alternative methods of scoping out the future.
Dr. Barker was inspired to research self-induced death when he witnessed a patient, a homeless laborer, brought to the hospital in a state of terror, crying out that he was going to die. Barker was unable to calm him down. “Then to our horror and amazement he suddenly stopped crying, fell back into the bed and quickly expired” (3). A post-mortem exam proved he was in perfect health.
Barker provides a harrowing chapter on autosuggestion and voodoo. “If a native believes himself to be “hoodooed”, “hexed”, “bewitched”, or “conjured”, he pines away and dies unless someone can be found who he considers has greater voodoo powers . . .” (18) Similar cases of hexing are cited in Australia, Africa, America and so forth, demonstrating the devastating power of sheer belief. The witch doctor in effect by virtue of curse or hex destroys the consciousness and will to live of the targeted victim. Cases are given of victims tottering on the edge of death who are persuaded by a counter-spell and are instantly restored to health.
Barker shows how politics combined with destructive magic can have murderous consequences, and “shows the extraordinary extent to which hatred and scheming machinations can build up between natives and so prepare the victim for voodoo-type death . . ..” (23). The malignant psychic influence through abusive language that Hitler unleashed on European Jews illustrates the dark side of the psyche in action. It explains the incredible rise to power of a psychopathic liar like Donald Trump as well as the bizarrely perverted conspiracy theories. The intent is to degrade the person by the magic of destructive language.
We should underscore another factor, the phenomenon of the “evil eye”—the malignant side of the Freudian superego. There is an ancient archetype—superstition, we could say—that we may be exposed to the Evil Eye, disposed to do us harm. This evil potential is proven by using charms, amulets, and talismans—all meant to protect us from the dark forces around us. Neuroscientist Paul Maclean writes of the “paranoid streak” in us, a byproduct of our reptilian brain. So, we can’t help being suspicious and we’re easily manipulated by unscrupulous influencers.
The destructive power of belief can be converted into healthy, creative power. The nocebo can kill is, but the placebo can cure us. There are stories of miraculous healings, more than stories of healthy people dying because of what of some fortune-teller might have said.
The antidote to self-destructive feelings is to educate yourself on how your mind works. Dr. Barker found that imbibing the values of a reason-and-truth honoring civilization is the best way to guard against succumbing to the black magic of our worst emotions. Love and truth are the antidotes to the disease of self-destruction. We are curious to hear stories that demonstrate the power of the mind to help or harm our health.
2 comments:
Michael, in my online class I use the following quoted material from a 2019 New Yorker article to illustrate the power of Nocebo:
Whether a nocebo can kill is an open question. In the seventies, oncologists in Australia and the U.S. reported cases of patients dying before their cancers were sufficiently advanced to end their lives. “The realization of impending death is a blow so terrible that they are quite unable to adjust to it,” Gerald Milton, the founder of the Sydney Melanoma Unit, wrote.
Between 1977 and 1982, more than fifty Hmong refugees, primarily from Laos, died in the U.S. from sudden-nocturnal-death syndrome, which the community generally interpreted as lethal nightmares, known as dab tsog. Postmortems revealed that some of the victims suffered from abnormal heart rhythms, which could have been exacerbated by the stress of immigration and the fear of an evil spirit crushing their chest in the night. “You can’t help but behave in a way that is the result of having been immersed since birth in a certain set of attitudes and thoughts,” Shelley Adler, the director of the Osher Center at the University of California, San Francisco, who interviewed hundreds of Hmong people about the deaths, told me.
Source:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/04/the-psychiatrist-who-believed-people-could-tell-the-future?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_022619&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9fadb2ddf9c72dc891a0b&user_id=49751374&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Daily
Thank you for sharing this fascinating comment on the power of nocebo. The notion of "lethal nightmares" is intriguing, but fortunately I've never had such an experience.
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