Ghost psychiatry

The Australian Journal of Parapsychology has an article about post-traumatic stress disorder in people who have been murdered.

I suspect diagnosing mental disorder in those who have passed onto another plane of existence isn’t the easiest form of mental health assessment but it seems this gentleman is determined to give it a go.

Psychological phenomena in dead people: Post- traumatic stress disorder in murdered people and its consequences to public health

Australian Journal of Parapsychology, Volume 13 Issue 1 (Jun 2013)

Wasney de Almeida Ferreira

The aims of this paper are to narrate and analyze some psychological phenomena that I have perceived in dead people, including evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in murdered people. The methodology adopted was “projection of consciousness” (i.e., a non-ordinary state of consciousness), which allowed me to observe, interact, and interview dead people directly as a social psychologist. This investigation was based on Cartesian skepticism, which allowed me a more critical analysis of my experiences during projection of consciousness. There is strong evidence that a dead person: (i) continues living, thinking, behaving after death as if he/she still has his/her body because consciousness continues in an embodied state as ‘postmortem embodied experiences’; (ii) may not realize for a considerable time that he/she is already dead since consciousness continues to be embodied after death (i.e., ‘postmortem perturbation’ – the duration of this perturbation can vary from person to person, in principle according to the type of death, and the level of conformation), and (iii) does not like to talk, remember, and/or explain things related to his/her own death because there is evidence that many events related to death are repressed in his/her unconscious (‘postmortem cognitive repression’). In addition, there is evidence that dying can be very traumatic to consciousness, especially to the murdered, and PTSD may even develop.

It is worth noting that the concept of post-mortem PTSD was largely invented by Big Parlour as a way of selling seances, when what spirits really need is someone to help them understand their experiences.
 

Link to abstract for article (via @WiringTheBrain)

10 thoughts on “Ghost psychiatry”

  5. @tgsmctoronto

    Of all the ‘mental disorders’, PTSD is about the only one where its sufferers are acknowledged to be ‘normal people having normal reactions to abnormal (external) events’.

    As someone diagnosed with PTSD (caused by serious, devastating crime), it certainly is hell.

    What really causes the hell is other people. By far the most PTSD triggers and anguish I experience come through people (who invariably think of themselves as kind, decent sorts) and those who work for ‘helping’ organisations and gvt depts – who also see themselves as kind, decent sorts just doing their jobs.

    What I’ve learned is that the vast majority of people are driven by fear. Oh, it’s under the surface and they mostly hide it well, behind job titles, badges, masks and the steely defences of medical and gvt targets – all of which tend to remove their natural, healing instincts of compassion and patience.

    Having laboured with PTSD for several years and still waiting for appropriate treatment, what I’d say now is that actually PTSD is above all a disorder of society.

    It just so happens that by being in the wrong place at the wrong times, the person later diagnosed with PTSD becomes a SYMPTOM of society’s dysfunctionalities. I now see how the vast majority of people carry their own trauma with mild symptoms or virtually asymptomatically as far as the outside world is concerned, whilst some of us actually manifest the symptoms more floridly.Perhaps we are the most ‘normal’, healthy and honest in that our reactions to horrors are not repressed or self-CBT’d out of our consciousnesses. Trauma reactions are appropriate to many of the many horrors in modern society.

    The sooner we all understand all this, the sooner PTSD will be honored, treated with genuine care and disappear from diagnostic manuals and our ‘mental health’ narratives.

    Reply

  7. Hello to everyone.

    Is this some kind of joke I don’t get or is it a serious study ?

    I remember reading an experiment about decapitation where reactions were tested after the subject was beheaded. The article stated that was to show that decapitation wasn’t “less cruel” than any other kind of death sentence since the victim was still feeling everything two or three second after her…death.

    But this seems a little too far, like an Hollywood scenario

    Reply

Leave a comment