Does "Psychic Death" Exist in Medicine?

In medical literature, as well as among laypeople in medicine, the strange phenomenon of sudden death of people of various ages under the influence of intense mental experiences accompanied by strong emotions has not gone unnoticed — with no or no significant pathological finding at autopsy.

In addition to the term “psychogenic death,” other terms for this kind of death exist: psychic death (Menninger), psychically conditioned death (Jores), death from psychic shock, death from fear, vagal death; in anthropological works dedicated to the causes of this death among so-called primitive peoples, the terms taboo death, voodoo death, death by suggestion are also used.

“Psychogenic death” would, in medicine, be that type of death which occurred without a definite somatopathological finding or cause, and in that way resists any acceptable natural-scientific explanation. Thus, for example, among the sudden deaths of a thousand seemingly healthy, young soldiers whom Moritz (1946) studied through autopsy, 10% — despite very thorough pathological and toxicological studies — remained unexplained and were classified as belonging to the group of “deaths caused by psychological reasons.”

Experts of various profiles became seriously interested in whether this type of death truly exists, by what physiological and psychological mechanisms it could be explained, whether it is equally widespread among civilized and primitive peoples, and whether anything could be done to protect against it.

First, Ellenberger, back in 1951, defined his reports about psychic death among primitive peoples in the following way:

“That some healthy, robust man can die in a short time from purely psychological causes may seem unbelievable, and yet it concerns reliable facts verified in a sufficiently observed number of cases.”

The oldest literature on voodoo death among primitive peoples comes from Brown, who in 1845 described the following verified event from New Zealand: passing by a tabooed place, a man could not resist the temptation and picked several beautiful peaches, ate some, and gave some to a woman who happened to meet him and desired the peaches. After the woman had eaten them with pleasure, he informed her from which place the peaches had been picked. Dropping her basket from her hands and turning pale, the woman was seized by mortal fear, despairing and lamenting that she had defiled the chief’s sanctuary. After several hours, falling into an increasingly depressive state, this woman died.

The term taboo, etymologically of Polynesian origin, was first used by the English Captain Cook in 1771 to signify something forbidden, and it contains within itself two seemingly opposing concepts: the sacred and the unclean. This concept seeks to describe a type of negative magic — that is, abstaining from certain actions in order to avoid unwanted magical consequences.

It is clear that an accepted taboo in every society tends to be associated with objects and actions significant for the social order of that society. It is not hard to imagine the great natural helplessness and fear of the primitive man to consciously or unconsciously resist or break a taboo-prohibition in the tribe. After such a transgression, he faces total isolation from other members, which is worse than death — and in the animal kingdom, where very similar situations occasionally occur, this indeed leads to death.

Zoologists and zoopsychologists are aware that exotic animals caught in a net sometimes die suddenly at the moment they are released from the net and placed in transport cages. The same thing happens with wild rats when they no longer have the possibility to fight or flee. It is also known that some species of shrews can faint or even drop dead out of fear from a sudden noise or squeak. These examples irresistibly remind us of undeniably psychogenic death among prisoners of war who had lost hope of ever returning to their homeland.

How unbearable separation from the collective, the family, or from close people is for a human — is best shown by the described form of psychic death “through autosuggestion or autohypnosis,” which is rather chosen, as a kind of suicide, than continuing to live in complete loneliness.

The state of the human soul has, in essence, not changed much even after tens of thousands of years. If the cases of the so-called psychic death are, overall, still more frequent among people with a simpler psychological structure — in both contemporary civilized society and among so-called primitive peoples — this fact does not contradict our claim about the slow change of the human soul.

Not only are cases of psychogenic death still known and recorded today among culturally developed people of our time, but we can also speak of numerous other cases of slow dying, with probably secondary physical processes, or even without them, that directly lead to death, where the primary cause of dying is psychological in nature. Let us remember the cases of rejected love (in very small children, but also in adults), after the death of close family members, early retirement, or chronic depression of other causes. In these and other unmentioned states, the main cause of these “illnesses without real illness,” yet with catastrophic consequences, is often — the internal or external violation of some taboo imposed by accepted social norms of conduct, resulting in social isolation, whether imposed by society or the individual themself.

The popular opinion that earlier man was natural, free, and healthy, while modern man is unnatural, unfree, and ill — corresponds little to reality. Man is a being that moves very slowly from unfreedom to freedom; this new freedom, however, cannot be similar to any natural freedom of primitive man, because it is above all freedom in the spirit, which is paid for with great suffering — illness and death. Hence, psychic death can also be understood as a type of mismatch between nature and spirit, as are many illnesses, especially psychological ones, a form of this conflict.

Within the group of psychically conditioned deaths, we can include yet another phenomenon difficult to explain through the natural-causal thinking of our rationalistic age. It concerns death foreseen in advance, sometimes even with an exact date and hour, by a patient who has just recovered from illness (this person does not even have to be a patient), or by another patient about to undergo surgery, who — without any overt inner conflict, without suicidal tendencies, without serious depression or clear panic — calmly states that they will die either during or immediately after the operation.

An example of the first type was provided by the well-known German psychiatrist Schulz (1965); examples of the second have been described more than once by anesthesiologists and surgeons. In both cases, no significant findings were discovered during autopsy to explain the death. However, these rare cases should not be confused with other, more common ones — such as surgical patients who show pronounced preoperative fear of death, but who almost always recover successfully after the operation.

We could conclude our small discussion like this: Man, as a being of both nature and spirit, inevitably carries fear within himself and therefore has the need to submit to various taboos. Psychic death is precisely the result and expression of this duality of the human being — of his fear, but also of his yearning for freedom, which deeply opposes both fear and taboos. The further man is from a natural way of life, which inevitably includes fear and submission to taboos (though the urge to break them is also present), the closer he is to freedom, which excludes primitive experience of fear and the power of taboo — and the further he is from becoming a victim of “psychic death.”

As if this kind of death and freedom exclude one another.

Vladeta Jerotic

Original source: https://teologija.net/da-li-u-medicini-postoji-psihicka-smrt/

Translation provided by ChatGPT (OpenAI) for educational and informational purposes. Translated from Serbian to English.