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Psychogenic death, the phenomenon of “thinking” yourself to death
- cyanydeez 5y agoThe real death of a person is the last time anyone thinks about them.
- Rygian 5y agoGNU Terry Pratchett.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoDid you know reddit sends out a clacks overhead message? HTTP/2 200 OK cache-control: private, s-maxage=0, max-age=0, must-revalidate, no-store content-encoding: gzip content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8 accept-ranges: bytes date: Thu, 06 Jan 2022 13:56:21 GMT via: 1.1 varnish vary: Accept-Encoding set-cookie: session_tracker=hiqqrhdfgaolpkerpj.0.1641477381482.Z0FBQUFBQmgxdlVGQjFmdmhTaU1QdnlBbzdIaUllQ2tMR2daQ2VpVm0tdjlNWWJLNklqWFFlc0sweFE4TjE2cmJvZVY3d284MFdaYUhLZl8ydzcwRjdVZERpdGlFU2RSclhiZE9vdkFSSzFMZ0NBN0hmQzBPUDJHS1lnZjVhWndaQWhQajlJdk1ySi0; path=/; domain=.reddit.com; secure; SameSite=None; Secure strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains x-content-type-options: nosniff x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block server: snooserv x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett X-Firefox-Spdy: h2 (Response to GET request from https://www.reddit.com/ https://www.reddit.com/) Not sure whether to be disappointed or to assume that's like, completely unofficial.
- diogenesjunior 5y agohttps://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about https://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/ http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/qoqm4x/til_reddit_still_has_xclacksoverhead_gnu_terry/ https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/qoqm4x/til_reddi... https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/2yt9j6/gnu_terry_pratchett/cpcvz46/ https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/2yt9j6/gnu_terry... https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/2z0eic/add_header_xclacksoverhead_gnu_terry_pratchett_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/2z0eic/a... https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/6rls1z/curious_as_to_which_sites_broadcast/ https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/6rls1z/curious_a... https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/en9eka/i_dont_understand_the_gnu_terry_pratchett/ https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/en9eka/i_dont_un... all good for those who don't understand
- VeninVidiaVicii 5y agoMy work essentially involves brainstorming new bacterial targets for antibiotics, and over the past couple years this idea has crept into my mind. Science statisticians tend to balk at the placebo effect, and use it as kind of a “zero effect”. But, I can’t help but notice how sometimes a placebo (or more generally a positive attitude) can actually help a patient overcome an illness. I’ve met enough people suffering from terrible bacterial infections, and from my eye, the most positive people tend to have the best outcomes. Of course, modern science would have my head for any mystical thinking.
- scubakid 5y agoIs it also possible that positivity is physically harder to achieve / less likely to manifest for patients whose systems are compromised in such a way that they can't overcome the infection? We are brain-body systems after all, so to me the causality seems hard to untangle.
- spdionis 5y agoDid the chicken come first or the egg?
- wrp 5y agoYour observation is not at all new. A famous quote from some doctor over a century ago, "Sometimes it's more important who has the disease than what disease the patient has."
- srean 5y agoThis is part of the reason why candidate drugs need to show better outcomes over placebo. Placebo has measurable effects compared to nocebo.
- robocat 5y ago> nocebo Nocebo has measurable negative effects: it is the opposite of the placebo effect. Nocebo is health problems or a worsening of symptoms, solely due to the conscious or subconscious expectation of harm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo Highly relevant to Covid vaccinations because subconsciously a lot of people fear side effects, so perhaps many anecdotal side effects are purely psychosomatic. I think psychosomatic symptoms are still truely harmful: few people can just decide to think themselves better.
- TomAbel 5y ago“When do you think people die? When they are shot through the heart by the bullet of a pistol? No. When they are ravaged by an incurable disease? No. When they drink a soup made from a poisonous mushroom!? No! It’s when… they are forgotten.” ― Dr. Hiriluk One Piece(Manga and Anime)
- lb0 5y agoRomantic but far off topic from what it is about here? With that, death becomes indeterministic for everybody, because unless believing that everything is predetermined, if someone will be remembered/thought off again is .. (even with the clacks thing btw). And then also, what about people living, and noone ever thinking of them, are they dead too? :s
- bjt2n3904 5y ago"Depart from me, I never knew you."
- micromacrofoot 5y agotell that to someone bleeding out
- NoGravitas 5y agoI expect that as the Jackpot progresses, we'll see a lot more people dying of dysexistential syndrome, even making up a substantial proportion of the death toll from climate-related disasters, crop failures, pandemics, and wars.
- rob_c 5y agoYou mean someone can die from turning themselves into a nervous wreck?... Someone phone Hollywood I've got a plot idea!
- bjt2n3904 5y agoLegitimately, this seems to be the result of MSNBC/CNN/FOX. A persistent source of existential anxiety. I'm not even sure that's their intention -- maybe it is. But it's certainly the result.
- anotherman554 5y agoFor anyone who doesn't follow I assume your reference to the "Jackpot" is a reference to the William Gibson novel "The peripheral" and its sequel where a vague, not disclosed to the reader series of disasters wipes out most of Earth's population in the 21st century. In the novels human society seems to have gotten too complex to be run by humans without such disasters. The only solution may be to create benevolent A.I. to run things for us.
- NoGravitas 5y agoMmmh, no, the Jackpot (in the Peripheral) was mostly climate-related, not due to excessive social complexity. The series of disasters is left vague because no one disaster by itself was very important. AI isn't very important to the story, either; the post-Jackpot society is run by kleptocrats.
- bserge 5y ago
- newsbinator 5y ago> But sometimes the threat — or the perception of it — doesn't pass. In that case, a person can lose hope of escape and, "the prefrontal cortex deliberately inhibits the production of dopamine in the basal ganglia to well below its functional level," says Leach. "That's associated with the feeling of hopelessness." If this continues for too long, it can become impossible to restart dopamine production. The person in this situation begins a "spiral of disengagement,"
- daviddaviddavid 5y agoThis seems to have been how one of my favorite composers, Arnold Schoenberg, died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg#Superstition_and_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg#Superstition...
- lelag 5y agoThe opposite effect has often been observed too. People with a mission will often managed to survive much longer than expected but then suddenly die as soon as they perceive to have accomplished that mission. An example that comes to my mind is that of Marcel Proust, who was sickly and suffered declining health for years. In the last three years of his life, we worked relentlessly on La Recherche, his life work. He managed to finish the last volume and died shortly after. I'm sure there are many others.
- bjt2n3904 5y agoI actually was concerned about byuu/near after the release of the Bahamut Lagoon translation for that very reason.
- LinuxBender 5y agoWould the legend of the ancient Greek messenger count? They raced from the site of Marathon to Athens a distance of 26.2 miles to deliver the message of a pending invasion then collapsed and died.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoYou don't even need to die for that; I think a lot of people have experienced a situation at least once in their life where after a period of intense work or stress, or not long after their vacation starts, they got sick. I'm not talking about being overworked so much, but flu-like symptoms. It's like your mind finally allows your body (and mind?) to relax, and it finally processes a lot of things it's been saving up. This isn't a very scientific comment, very anecdotal, but I believe it's not uncommon.
- borplk 5y agoYou can also think of that as an evolutionary advantage. Your biology delays the illness until you are more ready to handle it.
- mikepurvis 5y agoHeart attacks in the first year after retirement are a thing too: "Among 5,422 individuals in the study, those who had retired were 40% more likely to have had a heart attack or stroke than those who were still working. The increase was more pronounced during the first year after retirement, and leveled off after that." https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-retirement-good-for-health-or-bad-for-it-201212105625 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-retirement-good-for-h...
- giantg2 5y agoI would have thought depression and demoralized would have been flipped. Like one could be demoralized in an area without being depressed. I'm completely demoralized at work and have mostly stopped caring about it. But I find enjoyment in many things outside of work. Basically, I've become a terrible employee now that I see that the company (really all companies) will not stop lying and now focus most of my energy on hobbies outside of work.
- neurobashing 5y agoOne of the things they told us in infantry school was, "if you get shot, don't die", meaning: don't immediately think that you're dead, because experience has shown that you might actually die from a survivable wound if you _think_ you're a goner.
- rob_c 5y agoI've heard that a few times. I wonder what the stats on the effectiveness of that are (the military tends to be great for record keeping)
- watwut 5y agoI doubt they are able to accurately measure mental state of wounded soldiers in the middle of fight. And keep track of those records.
- samstave 5y agoI'm mostly talking out my ass on this one, but thought I would share... My brother is a doctor (CMO of the largest health system in a state, he was previously head of the Veterans administration for said state, Commander of the 10th medical wing in the USAF (he's a ret. Colonel - gave up the General track) , personal flight surgeon to the joint chiefs at the dod... etc...) I asked him recently about covid related use of the ICU rooms at his facility... and I was stunned that he answered that "we don't keep records of that" I had been asking about who was vaxxed and not - and he said that he had several people who were vaxxed and got covid and also died, the youngest being 30, who was vaxxed but also one of his employees at the hospital. The point though is just how much I was surprised at the statement that they aren't keeping records.... He was a field surgeon in Iraq, but I haven't talked to him about that experience much...
- watwut 5y agoI find that odd. Here they do track covid ICU nationally and covid even have them separated (they don't mix covid patients with car crashes). The lockdown was because capacities were getting full. And they also know who is vaccinated, so the general claim doctors were saying was that vaccinated seldom end up in ICU and very rarely die. Most in serious condition are unvaccinated. Causes of death tend to be tracked on national level too. It might be that hospital does not care, but death certificates for all kinda of stuff should be written somewhere.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoYou also see this with long term couples. When a husband or wife of 40 to 50 years dies, many times it seems the surviving spouse dies within the year, even when they were healthy at the time of death of the first spouse.
- ModernMech 5y agoThis happened to my grandparents. My grandmother was a kind of hypochondriac who had been claiming she was on the verge of death for 30 years. But she wasn't without health problems -- overweight, diabetic, smoker. But she kept going, nevertheless. Then my grandfather died, and she followed about a year later. I really can't help but think he was keeping her going at the end.
- watwut 5y agoDo you gave source for that? cause there are too many old widows for me to believe the couples often die around the same time. And I did not noticed this pattern in cemetery either.
- jorgesborges 5y agoI worked in a retirement home and sometimes witnessed the inverse: a husband or wife dies (more often a husband) and the surviving spouse feels liberated and rejuvenated as if decades of weight have been lifted, and they spring to life making new friends and appear generally more happy and healthy. It’s still a processes — there’s a period of grief and adjustment but I’ve seen it happen a few times.
- Terry_Roll 5y agoI'll have to give this a go and see if it works.
- quantified 5y agoIt won’t. It’s amazing how severely depressed people will wish themselves to not be alive for days on end and get nowhere with it. Hence suicide needs to be active. Not saying it’s the preferred way to approach things. Just that there’s more to it than a simple giving up.
- inetknght 5y agoAre you okay?
- Terry_Roll 5y agoIts tongue in cheek.
- moolcool 5y agoThis reminds me of the Monty Python "Funniest Joke in the World" sketch
- vsnf 5y agoIn the Dark Souls series, NPCs in the world will succumb to the undead curse, that universe’s rough equivalent of death, after they’ve become completely satisfied with their life, or have had their main purpose fulfilled or removed in some way.
- scollet 5y agoThere's always ng+!
- adolph 5y agoThis sounds similar to octopus senescence. Senescence is not a disease or a result of disease, although diseases can also be a symptom of it. Both males and females go through a senescent stage before dying-the males after mating, the females while brooding eggs and after the eggs hatch. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7545324_Octopus_Senescence_The_Beginning_of_the_End https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7545324_Octopus_Sen...
- 1_player 5y agoOr they have just given up, and turn into mindless Hollows. The overarching philosophy of the series being that you will become forgotten dust in a world even the Gods have abandoned, yet you keep fighting with every ounce of your what little soul remains in you. This oppressively nihilistic atmosphere has given many players solace during difficult times.
- Zababa 5y agoThe term for that is "going hollow". This is used in great effect in a specific point of the series (in rot13 to not spoil): Gur svany svtug vf ntnvafg Tnry, gung'f orra frnepuvat sbe "gur oybbq bs gur qnex fbhy" fb gur tvey gung ur cebgrpgf pna cnvag n arj jbeyq. Ur jrag gb gur evatrq pvgl, sbhaq gur cltzvrf gung ner fhccbfrq gb pneel gung oybbq, naq sbhaq bhg gung gurve oybbq unq eha qel. Fb ur ngr gurz. Jura lbh ernpu unys bs uvf UC one, n phgfprar cynlf va juvpu ur oyrrqf ba uvf fjbeq, naq fnlf "Vf guvf gur oybbq? Gur oybbq bs gur qnex fbhyf?". Gur svtugf fgnegf ntnva, guvf gvzr jvgu Tnry svtugvat abg yvxr na raentrq ornfg ohg yvxr n zna ng uvf crnx. Ng guvf cbvag, ur nyfb orpbzrf ubyybj. Ur unf nppbzcyvfurq uvf tbny, naq gur ynfg guvat gb qb vf gb chg hc n tbbq svtug orsber qlvat sbe gur arj jbeyq naq gur tvey. That was, to me, one of the most touching moment in the series.
- bigyellow 5y ago
- swayvil 5y agoPeople wait to get sick on the weekend, or on vacation. That's a common example of this phenomenon.
- stared 5y agoI have had it a lot. But I guess it is all about drop of adrenaline - i.e. symptoms where masked, and body finally had time to rest a bit.
- musesum 5y agoA relevant read is "The Molecule of More ...", which explored the function of Dopamine in great detail [1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38728977 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38728977
- JackFr 5y agoLiterally everyone in these comments has an anecdote, but I remain skeptical. The jump from reduced-dopamine-production to heart-stops-beating is a little hand-wavy. What is the concrete mechanism? For instance in the opening anecdote in the article, what did the girl die of? Also I’m put off by statements like “this ability to construct a meaningful (or even possible) path into the future is related to our dopamine circuits”. This has the patina of science, but “is related to” is pretty nebulous and “dopamine circuits” are constructs of the scientists model rather than physical processes in the brain.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- datameta 5y agoOur expectation of pain actually affects experienced chronic pain. Because it isn't strictly bodily damage that is responsible for "feeling" pain, it is also how our brain processes that sensory information. This is how acute pain becomes chronic, the brain "overfits" for detecting that sensory input from the nerves to try to bring our attention to it more and more, as this might have been evolutionarily helpful. But when under treatment during this era of modern medicine, dwelling on the pain or feeling helpless about it we allow our brain to prioritize the signals as a stressor and increase the "pain volume" which ends up being counterproductive to our daily lives. Learning this has allowed me to significantly reduce pain medication intake and increase physical activity. Measured and steady physical activity is often the solution for chronic pain, when convention and intuition dictates that rest is the solution. This leads to a cycle of increased stiffness and lack of mobility. Pain isn't "just in your head" but understanding that the pain experience can be mediated in more ways than solely just medication (thankful as I am for it) is empowering and hope inducing. So all that is to say that I am not surprised if it turns out our mind can affect our body in the ways stated in this article.
- unwoundmouse 5y agoI'm also curious about the rigor of this argument, don't know why you've been downvoted
- adrian_b 5y ago
- andrepew 5y agoIf a person is identified as susceptible to this, do we need to revisit the current standards in medical ethics? If telling someone of their diagnosis is a substantial risk to their health, should they be told? Should doctors always communicate a poor prognosis?
- s1artibartfast 5y agoNo we shouldn't revisit ethics, and yes doctors should always communicate prognosis. Patient benefit should never be a singular goal to the exclusion of all else. Even if it were, there are significant downstream effects to reducing the trust in medical professionals
- xwdv 5y agoAlso if you ever get shot multiple times on your body, do not look down at your wounds, if you do you will greatly increase your chances of dying right there. You have to continue on and ignore them as much as possible.
- hosh 5y agoMy understanding is that old school physicians (maybe about 100 years ago or more) didn't consider themselves the agent of healing, but rather, assistants in the healing process. It was a part of the care for their patients, helping them with the continued will to live. Our modern medicine with its metrics measures clinical outcomes as if consciousness plays no part in outcomes, and our healthcare policies are all formed around this. The other questions that came to mind ... at the risk of starting up something controversial: - How much, if any, of the covid-19 deaths are co-morbid with dysexistential syndrome? - And how much of the perceived risks to vaccination and boosters with covid-19 lead to psychogenic death? - How much does the will to survive play in both effects from covid-19 and taking vaccines?
- shadowgovt 5y agoI think you're catching downvotes because you touched a current third rail, but you're raising valid points regarding things we already know about the interaction between human cognitive function and health. If I inject harmless saline into your veins and tell you it's poison and will slowly kill you, you will have a physiological negative reaction if you believe me, even though the saline does nothing to change your biochemistry except some minor dilution. Your firm belief will trigger (via poorly understood subconscious processes) autonomous responses that will fight an attack on your system that isn't there. It's extremely unlikely you'll die from something like that, but we've known about the placebo effect for a while now, and the nocibo effect (a negative reaction because the patient believes the treatment causes harm) is also demonstrated in the literature. I don't doubt that some of the public reports of negative effects from the vaccine are psychosomatic nocebo effect. This is exactly why raw VAERS statistics are a terrible source of information about the actual biological effect of a vaccine intervention... Without further information, you can't disambiguate negative or positive outcomes caused biologically by the vaccine contents from negative or positive outcomes caused by psychosomatic reaction.
- hosh 5y agoThanks for responding. I havn't caught any downvotes yet (or maybe, they disappeared into upvotes). I put that in there because I know the subject matter might become a downvote magnet ... and if it does, so be it. I'm glad you articulating the topic with more precision than I have. As far as those outcomes goes, I don't think we are adequately tracking this, for covid-19 or for other health concerns. I have zero idea how much of this influences things with covid-19, which is why I am raising these questions. I'm more interested in seeing that these questions are asked, and whatever answers we find, they are what they are. My own personal experience is that "psychosomatic" as a term has been used to dismiss or handwave those poorly understood mechanisms -- not necessarily with covid-19 specifically, but more in general. I'm similar to other DIY body hackers, but I work more along the lines of working with consciousness rather than something like DIY gene therapy. Some of my personal experiments yielded some results, and some have not. It's part of why these questions came up for me.
- stared 5y ago> As it happened, the first girl was killed in a car accident on the day before her sixteenth birthday. The second girl made it to her twenty-first birthday. She thought the spell was broken, so she went out to celebrate, but at the bar a fight broke out, a gun went off, and she was also killed. I am skeptical. Did they write down this hex before the deaths happened?
- drcongo 5y agoI stopped reading at the end of that obviously fake anecdote, how much credibility can the rest of the article have if they actually believe that story.
- grungegun 5y agoThe doctors don't believe the story. The woman does. The doctors believe that the woman's belief caused her early death, but that's independent of whether they accept that story as true - people (the woman) can convince themselves of a lot of things.
- drcongo 5y agoYou're absolutely right. However, I'm still struggling to believe that the woman existed at all, the entire story just sounds so made up.
- 2-718-281-828 5y agoIt confuses me everytime that scientists have such difficulties accepting that the mind can have healing or destructive impact on the body by means of thoughts and emotions. After all the mind is inseperably embedded into the body (first and foremost through the brain). Actually accepting this is closer to scientific thinking than conjouring up a hypothetic sandbox the mind supposedly operates in. Instead the former is usually discarded as esoteric. Seems like scientists and physicians are at the end of the day just regular folks who happend to have spent a lot of time learning about a very small part of reality. Who can blame them for their inability to put pieces to gether and see the bigger picture.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoTotally agree. It’s getting better but people still can’t wrap their head around the fact that the mind influences the body and the body influences the mind in a never ending feedback cycle. I guess thinking like this makes the whole system way too complex to analyze. Same happens in economics. Economists often model things based on the idea that people make only rational decisions based on their own gains and nothing else. The fact that people make decisions based on many other factors gets iginredd.
- gherkinnn 5y agoI fail to understand how many physicalists have trouble understanding just what kind of influence the mind has on the body. You know, it all being the same.
- 52-6F-62 5y agoFor real. This is a subject that I find immensely fascinating and endlessly exciting. It's massive and we're barely starting to figure out that there's a surface we can even scratch (even though some segments of study have been shouting about it for some time, even if they've been a bit inaccurate or clumsy about it). The more I learn, the less I seem to know. For example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026265X21006445 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026265X2... https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8753 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8753 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5433113/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5433113/
- can16358p 5y agoI'm wondering what could really prevent this for someone thinking they will surely die at some time. Someone close to me (who doesn't have a physiological illness) literally/obsessively thinks that she'll die at the age 40 (5 years to go) and I have trouble convincing her that she won't. After reading this, I'm more concerned. Any recommendations?
- CountDrewku 5y agoShe needs to stop being afraid of fear. This is the basis for all anxiety disorders. Fear of fear. You get into loop where you're literally scared of fear itself. The solution is simple, death is scary. So what? She will need to force herself to sit with that fear and become indifferent about it or even learn to like it in some way if possible. Similar to exposure with phobic people, or ignoring behaviors with OCD. I'd recommend reading Claire Weeks Hope and Help for Your Nerves. Also, I'd recommend not playing this game of convincing her she won't die. She's probably habituated some sort of compulsive behavior of trying to release the fear by asking you to sooth it (pretty similar to OCD handwashing when you think about it). You're only reinforcing her behavior.
- klipt 5y agoIf she believes she's under a voodoo curse or something, maybe the best psychological treatment is to get her voodoo-uncursed, by a witchdoctor, or priest of her favorite religion, or via some other ritual. E.g. get her friends together to ritually form a "ring of protection" around her and go around 3 times to triple her time from 40 to 120 years.
- titanomachy 5y agoHas she considered doing a month-long silent retreat, or mediated psychedelic therapy? Both have the potential to significantly restructure a person's belief system. They're not without risks, but if you really think the alternative is that she dies in five years...
- can16358p 5y agoI agree. It would be impossible to convince her into the first one. And the second one isn't available in here (if it were, I'd love to try it as well).
- drewcon 5y agoI'm not sure I need to add "thinking myself to death" to my list of worries today.
- shadowgovt 5y agoOne of the interesting aspects of human neurophysiology is that our sensory organs and limbic system are intermediated by malleable neurons. This is not true of all organisms... Most animals have far more direct, mechanical neuron connections between their senses and their biological hormonal triggers for things like aggression or fear. This fact is a two-sided coin. On the one side... Brilliant! We can change our minds! There is nothing, physically, preventing us from becoming our most fearless selves and adapting mentally to any circumstance the universe can throw at us. ... And by the same token, we can become physiologically terrified (a fear response with actual hormonal fight or flight triggers) over things like open spaces or empty chairs because an inconvenient coincidence in the past caused our brains to burn a path from sensory input to survival instinct that (once established) can be incredibly hard to reset. The downside to a general purpose computer is you can crash it.
- daxfohl 5y agoThe very first episode of This American Life was about an instance where someone convinced himself for a year that he was going to die on a specific day, and then, didn't.
- grouphugs 5y ago
- aerostable_slug 5y agoIn EMT training, you're taught that if someone tells you they're going to die, believe them ("feeling of impending doom" IIRC).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vanderZwan 5y ago> As it happened, the woman had been born on Friday the 13th in Florida's Okefenokee Swamp. The midwife who'd delivered her had also delivered two other children that day. She told the girls' parents that all three children had been hexed. The first girl would die before her sixteenth birthday. The second would die before her twenty-first. The third—the woman in this hospital—would die before she turned twenty-three. I'm sorry to get off-topic, but what kind of midwife would do such a thing? Other than "a character in a made-up story", that is.
- sibeliuss 5y agoI'm skeptical of this story as well. Not that I don't believe in this kind of thing. But its a bit hmmm
- vanderZwan 5y agoExactly: multiple friends of mine had grandparents who explicitly were saying they were only holding on for long enough to see a great-grandchild being born, or a grand-child get married, or something along those lines, and who then passed away a few weeks after that milestone was reached. Based on that kind of anecdata I too believe in the impact of belief on health. It is just this particular story that raises a few questions.
- colordrops 5y agoWoah, there's a name for my greatest phobia. I've got PTSD from experiencing an NDE by thinking myself there during a psychedelic trip.
- stakkur 5y agoWe often believe the opposite is true, so…why not?
- tomaskafka 5y agoThis is terrible to even think about, but this might explain why the babies are/were dying in hospitals when alone. They lose hope, and inhibit their dopamine production to a point where it cannot be restarted. Seems exactly like what Aaron Swartz described here: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hospitalbabies http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hospitalbabies We still live in barbaric times.
- ed_elliott_asc 5y agoDo you think this is why when an old couple in love, one does, sometimes the partner dies soon afterwards?
- lokimedes 5y agoFunny how this triggers the argument that we are avatars in a simulation. Why spend game time idling when you know the game is lost?