Psychiatrists are famous for pretending to know things that they don't actually know. For many decades psychiatrists peddled at high prices extremely dubious Freudian speculations about the causes of human behavior, such as the idea that a son's inner conflicts stem from his repressed lust for his mother. Around 1960 such explanations were all the rage, and Park Avenue psychoanalyst followers of Freud were raking in fortunes. Within a few decades such explanations fell out of favor, and now Freud's theories are mainly regarded as pseudoscience. Psychiatrists replaced their misguided Freud enthusiasm with neural explanation enthusiasms, mostly misguided ones. Supported by a pharmaceutical industry that stood to take in countless millions or billions from such stories, our psychiatrists told us for at least two decades (1990-2010) that diseases such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain or shortages of serotonin. Recently there has been widespread discussion of a meta-analysis claiming that such claims lack any sound scientific basis. A regular reader of the illuminating Mad in America web site (www.madinamerica.com) will read very many other cases of psychiatrists pretending to know things they do not actually know.
Once again, we have in the press a case of a psychiatrist trying to make us think that he knows something that he does not actually know. The psychiatrist is Max Pemberton, who tries to make us think (in a Daily Mail article he wrote) that he knows what causes apparition sightings. I am unable to find any previous writings he has made on this topic (in particular, using Google Scholar I cannot find any paper he has written on this topic).
Pemberton starts out by making the claim that the brain is the most complex object in the universe, which is a perfect example of authorities making claims they should not make, given that humans are ignorant about what exists on 99.99999999% of all planets in the universe, and given that human bodies are objects far more complex than human brains. Pemberton then states this: "I was fascinated to read in the Mail Santa Montefiore's account of seeing the spirit of her late sister, Tara Palmer Tomkinson, sitting on her bed, and the subsequent flurry of reports last week from readers who had also 'encountered' a loved one after they had died." Pemberton then immediately begins to call such reports "hallucinations," even though he does not mention interviewing Ms. Montefiore. We may wonder whether he has forgotten the principle of, "Don't point a psychiatric finger at someone until you have interviewed that person at length."
Continuing to make an unjustified use of the word "hallucination" or "hallucinatory" Pemberton says this: "Studies show that between 30 and 50 per cent of people who have lost their spouse experience at least one hallucinatory episode in which they see their loved one." No, studies do not show that large fractions of those who have lost their spouse have hallucinations of seeing their loves ones. Studies merely indicate that large numbers of spouses report seeing their loved ones after death, and such studies do nothing to tell us about the cause of such reports.
Pemberton cites a 90% figure from Japan, saying "Research in Japan showed that 90 per cent of widows there experienced them." Pemberton then attempts an explanation:
"Of course, some look for a spiritual explanation, but from a psychological perspective, it seems to me fairly clear-cut. Seeing a dead person is a form of wish-fulfilment, the brain's way of giving the bereaved person what they so desperately want, which is just a little longer with the person they've lost."
This explanation is nonsensical. People don't have hallucinations just because they want to see something. A lonely sex-craving young man alone on a Saturday night in his apartment will never see a hallucination of a naked buxom blonde in front of him. Needy people with little money don't have hallucinations of stacks of money on their table. The long-suffering fans of poorly performing sports teams don't see hallucinations in which their beloved team wins the game despite actually losing. And when US mothers and fathers saw their children go away for years to distant lands to fight in wars such as World War II or the Vietnam War, none of such parents saw an apparition of the child they longed to see, unless their offspring had died. There is no tendency of healthy human beings to hallucinate seeing things that they long for. And in a large fraction of the cases in which people report seeing an apparition of a deceased human, the person was not longing to see such a person.
Pemberton has just contrived a "you hallucinate what you long for" explanation that does not correspond to the way human minds work, and does not correspond to the facts about apparition sightings (which often involve two or more people seeing the same apparition). Faced with ambiguous or hazy data that can be interpreted in many ways, humans often interpret such data in a way that fits their desires. But that common type of "seeing what you want to see" interpretation doesn't involve having hallucinations of something you wanted to see.
Pemberton then tells us that ghost sightings are caused by "the power of love." No, love doesn't have any power to make you see a person in your house who isn't there. There's no love greater than the love of a parent for a child, but parents with runaway or missing children never see apparitions of the missing child in their home unless the child has died. If Pemberton were a scholar of apparition sightings, he would know that a large fraction of apparition sightings are reported by people who had either no great love for the ghostly figure seen, or were not at all wishing to see any apparition of such a person. Follow the links in my post here, and you can read of hundreds of such cases, most of which involve cases in which people saw an apparition of someone who they did not even know was dead, someone who died about the same time.
The fires of passionate youthful love typically wane by the time a couple reaches old age, and bodies turn ugly; and a large fraction of old married couples quarrel or have mixed feelings toward each other. There is no sense in an idea that 50% (or as many as 90%) of widows might hallucinate a ghost because of some overwhelming passionate desire to see their deceased love one again. I would imagine that fewer than 15% of old widows or old widowers have any such overwhelming desire.
Later Pemberton reports a case of a man who claimed to see repeated apparitions of his deceased wife. Pemberton says, "His visions may well have been a clever trick played on him by his brain, and easily explained by neurochemical interactions." When psychiatrists or neuroscientists don't have explanations, their last-resort fallback is to make vague brief empty hand-waving references to things such as "neurochemical interactions."
Pemberton provides no actual evidence for these explanations, citing no scientific studies in favor of any of them. He sounds like someone just coming up with whatever guesses might pop into his head. Something weightier than Pemberton's vacuous speculations is the article "Ghosts, visions and voices," written by a psychiatrist (Frances Klemperer) who actually includes a few references to scientific papers. But none of the references are to compelling studies that support any of Klemperer's explanations.
Klemperer makes the following attempts to explain apparitions, in this order:
(1) Undigested food (an absurd explanation, since people constantly have undigested food in their stomachs).
(2) Demons or jinn deceiving humans.
(3) Vitamin deficiency from fasting, obviously a poor explanation since 98% of people reporting apparitions were not fasting enough to have vitamin deficiencies, and there is no reason why a vitamin deficiency would cause you to see a ghost.
(4) A transient psychosis produced by self-flagellation, obviously a poor explanation since 99.9% of people reporting apparitions were not flagellating themselves before seeing the apparition.
(5) "Prolonged vigils" in which people see apparitions because of very long sleep deprivation, obviously a poor explanation since 99% of people reporting apparitions had not very long gone without sleep.
(6) "Prolonged introspection" which causes hallucinations, a bad explanation because there in no evidence that introspection causes people to see sights of deceased relatives, and 99% of the time people who report such things were not previously engaging in prolonged introspection.
(7) Head injuries, a bad explanation because of a lack of any evidence head injuries cause people to see apparitions of deceased people, and a lack of such injuries preceding sightings of apparitions.
(8) Misinterpretations of real objects, an explanation useful only for people claiming to see some ghost at a far distance, not any of the far more common cases of people reporting an apparition right in front of them.
(9) Waking dreams, in which someone reports his dream as something he saw when awake, an explanation useless for explaining 95% of apparition sightings, which do not occur when someone has just awaken from a dream, or which involve claims of clear perception of deceased people seen after someone has awoken, such as a case of someone saying, "I awoke, and there was my dead mother, sitting right on the edge of my bed."
(10) Misidentification of a sound, such as someone hearing something on TV and misidentifying it as his name being called, an explanation useless for explaining reports of visual ghost sightings.
(11) "Severe stress may precipitate transient, complex hallucinations, which the subject recognises as arising from his or her imagination." The claim is a dubious one, and is useless for explaining 95% of apparition sightings, which either do not occur under severe stress, or are not recognized by the observer as being due to his or her imagination.
(12) "Dissociative mechanisms," an appeal to a type of severe mental disorder, an explanation useless for explaining apparition sightings by ordinary healthy people who do not have split personalities or dissociative mental disorders.
Klemperer has used one of the main strategies of people trying to explain the paranormal: attempt a kind of "smorgasbord" or "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" approach in which you drag out a dozen little explanations. When this is done, typically none of the explanations is a good one. But there's a chance the reader may be impressed, given so many things offered. What's going on is similar to when someone tries to explain the sightings of large UFOs in the sky by saying "it must have been dust in your eye or Venus or a meteor or a jet or a drone or a satellite launch or swamp gas or a Chinese lantern or some hallucination or a camera malfunction."
Pemberton's article seems like a featherweight bit of fluff compared to the "deep dive" article on spiritually transformative experiences (STE) published earlier this year by Robert Davis PhD. But the article by Davis has its own severe problems. One is the attempt to lump together very diverse experiences (some produced by drugs, and others such as NDE and OBE and UFO sightings not produced by drugs) under a too-broad umbrella of "spiritually transformative experiences." We may wonder whether what is going on is another case of trying to shame and stigmatize people who report out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences or UFO sightings by lumping them together with users of illegal psychedelics. Davis seems to have the goal of pathologizing the millions who have such experiences, because he repeatedly talks of aspects of their experiences as "symptoms," and his article has a large-font boldface statement suggesting that spiritually transformative experiences are things that "psychiatrists and psychologists" need to "diagnose and treat."
Referring to all the cases of people reporting seeing or telepathically communicating with anomalous or mysterious entities, Davis unwisely tells us that "entity encounters cannot be dismissed as non-sensical hallucinations without meaning nor accepted as true alternate and transcendent realities," making it rather clear that he seems to prefer a "meaningful hallucination" explanation. He provides nothing of substance to back up such a speculation, and he follows it only with empty or preposterous suggestions as to why so many would be seeing entities that are not there. First he claims that we are "wired to detect sentient others…a predisposition that would have a significant survival value in hostile environments (Winkelman & James, 2018, p. 14)." No, if people were in danger in the wild it would not have any survival value for people to see ghosts or extraterrestrials or a Being of light or any other beings that were not there. On the basis of a vague weak-sounding insinuation that some brain regions have merely been "potentially associated with spiritual development and behavior," Davis asks us to choose between believing that spiritually transformative experiences are "a normal part of the physical evolutionary experience, or an innate physiological coping mechanism to manage times of crisis to help maintain the survival of humanity." Both of these alternatives are preposterous. People don't see deceased relatives during near-death experiences as any part of a "physical evolutionary experience," and individual human beings have neither physical evolutionary experiences nor mental evolutionary experiences (unless you want to stretch "evolutionary" far beyond any "natural selection" meaning). And it is extremely ridiculous to suggest that people see deceased relatives or a "Being of light" or what may look like extraterrestrials to "help maintain the survival of humanity."
The article by Davis clearly involved much more work than the article by Pemberton. But from the standpoint of explaining the paranormal Davis seems just as empty-handed as Pemberton, and neither offer any credible explanations of substance.
Psychiatrists have long acted partially as kind of social conformity policemen, acting to make sure that people act according to the prevailing norms and conventions of some society. Before 1970 psychiatrists acted as part of the enforcement of heterosexuality, acting to stigmatize and marginalize homosexuals by branding them as mentally ill. In the Soviet Union psychiatrists were a key part of the suppression of dissidents, and under that regime many a political dissident was put in a psychiatric institution after being wrongly classified with "sluggish schizophrenia" mostly because of statements denouncing the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union. When those with psychic experiences very widespread among healthy people are branded as having hallucinations, what is going on seems like a similar attempt of stigmatizing phenomena not approved by our ruling class of authorities, based on arbitrary, dubious or socially constructed ideas of what proper people should or should not report seeing, thinking or doing. When psychiatrists tell people that meaningful apparition-sighting experiences they have are hallucinations, the very real therapeutic value of such experiences is trashed, and the potential help is senselessly replaced with potential harm, as witnesses are stigmatized and shamed.
The paper "Psychiatry and Fads: Why Is This Field Different From All Other Fields?" by psychiatry professor Edward Shorter tells us this:
"Gripped in the turbulence of changing paradigms, psychiatry has taken a couple of colossally wrong turns over the years. The whole DSM concept and the ditching of effective but out-of-patent drug classes in favour of blockbusters would be 2 good examples...However, fads as well seem to drive much of psychiatry...In psychiatry, the basic problem is that, from the early 20th century to the present, the field has lurched back and forth among paradigms in a way that has happened in no other discipline. Each lurch has sprayed off its own accumulation of fads and bad ideas."
In the recent Counterpunch.org article "Once Radical Critiques of Psychiatry are Now Mainstream, So What Remains Taboo?" by Bruce E. Levine we have a very broad and slashing critique of today's psychiatry, one that is well worth reading. The article laments what it calls psychiatry's "poor treatment outcomes." A very serious question that must be asked is: are many psychiatrists doing more harm than good? No doubt very many are helped by psychiatrists. But many think that harmful side effects of medications prescribed by psychiatrists are being swept under the rug or insufficiently studied, and that for very many people who did not need to see psychiatrists, long-term psychiatric treatment can often do more harm than good. The very long document here (written by an MD) gives very many specific complaints along these lines. Some think that psychiatrists have entanglements with the pharmaceutical industry which constitute financial conflicts of interest that cloud their judgment in evaluating the pros and cons of the pills psychiatrists so heavily prescribe. Others think that incalculable harm is done when psychiatrists label people with diagnostic categories that are often arbitrary social constructs of a psychiatrist belief community or some too-powerful committee, perhaps unnecessarily causing people to think for the rest of their lives that are sick or sub-standard. The weak theoretical basis of psychiatric assumptions is discussed here and here.
Whenever a psychiatrist attempts to gaslight people by branding as hallucinations mental experiences that large fractions of the population have, experiences psychiatrists cannot credibly explain, then we seem to be in the very dark and harmful territory of "mass pathologization," in which psychiatrists speak in a way that tends to make very many who are not mentally ill feel or think that they suffer from some mental problem or brain glitch. Whenever we read a psychiatrist who may be improperly causing very many healthy people to think that they have some mental problem they do not actually have, some "glitch in the brain" they do not actually have, we should ask such a psychiatrist: is your overall activity recently doing more to harm people than to help people? We should also ask: how much better results would psychiatrists get if they were to treat people as souls in crisis rather than malfunctioning brains?
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