Psychogenic death, the phenomenon of “thinking” yourself to death

If you give up you are a gonner if you dont you may make it, and everyone who has survived had a determination to struggle on even when it looked bleak (i think the stats say something like if you are not out of the water in 5 mins you are unlikely to survive - even with a survival suit.)

They show videos of people passing out as they are airlifted out of the sea too and falling out of the sling. or passing out and drowning when they see the helicopter overhead - assuming that they dont need to fight any more.

If I remember right, the conclusion was that 50% of the time, it didn't matter what the caliber was. The person got hit, realized they'd been shot, thought they were supposed to fall down, and then did.

The other 50% did come down to the bullet caliber, lining up pretty much as you'd expect, along with some interesting stories of people who took mortal wounds from high-caliber rounds and kept fighting for a few minutes.

Ten minutes later I was the point man while pushing upstairs and must have been hit about 10 times and I ignored it like Superman.

The hearing can work even if no other senses work they told us and if I understood it correctly they meant these words could make the wounded person give up.

We think we are being kind but it's the kindness of talking someone into jumping off a cliff instead of trying to climb back down.

If you want your family members to have the best chance of coming home, tell them that you are not ready for them to go and that you still need them.

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.

Accomplished people are almost always accomplishing things, even into late life. By definition, the last thing they accomplish is their final accomplishment. Even if deaths were randomly distributed, you’d expect to find a lot of these people dying shortly after finishing their last accomplishment.

I think it's a bit like ego thing and positive feedback loop. She takes pride in her longevity.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2020/02/12/first-a...

He had Cancer, but I think he picked the timing.

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.

You know, it all being the same.

The more I learn, the less I seem to know.

For example:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026265X2...

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8753

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5433113/

I've heard doctors say things like "she lost the will to live after her husband died". And most actual life scientists I know have a healthy regard for the limits of our knowledge.

Some of my fellow software engineers, on the other hand...

I think plenty of physicians have personal opinions and hypotheses about the impact of the brain on the body, but it's something incredibly difficult to validate or refute, experiments are very hard to carry out on this subject, and consequently the responsible thing for a scientist to do is to avoid making conclusions or coming to a consensus on the basis of how nice or appealing something sounds.

If you want to hold a personal opinion on the subject, go for it... if that opinion inspires you to pursue an interest and develop a testable theory... wonderful do it. Until then, from a professional point of view it's best to avoid perpetuating an idea, no matter how strongly you believe it to be, as a well established scientific fact.

But your mind cannot perform miracles. Most of the examples in this article and others are likely coincidences. There are many people who desperately wanted to kill themselves but couldn’t, and people who by all means should have wanted to live but unexpectedly passed away.

Kind of like how the mind is inseparable from the body, science is inseparable from human bias and fallacies.

Just take the first case, girl goes to a doctor because she is out of breath and chest pains, tells him a tale about witchcraft, dies. What reason is there to believe that the fear of witchcraft made that happen and not all the other symptoms that point to an undiagnosed medical condition? Or maybe we should just believe witchcraft is real and can make car accidents and gun shots happen?

There is no shortage of people who want to die. And no shortage of people that do die. Every day. If this would be a real thing, it should be possible to come up with some better example than stuff that happened many decades or even centuries ago.

People will gloss over this, as this is the common western view, but it should be noted that this is not how it is.

Your body is contained in your mind. Your universe is contained within your mind. All of this is simply the contents of your mind.

It’s interesting you say this stance may actually be more ‘scientific’. My grandmother had a large part in my upbringing, and she was a life long Christian Scientist (not to be confused with Scientology). She raised me on its principals. They are hard to articulate concisely, but your words are pretty close.

It’s almost like scientists want to ignore Mind, and try to describe the world only in terms of matter. They believe matter, all on its own, contains all the answers and all the Intelligence of the universe.

A Christian Scientist on the other hand, believes Mind is everything and matter is nothing. Love, Wisdom, Intelligence are all properties of Mind. So no wonder others are surprised or confused when it’s power over the material world is clearly demonstrated.

Sometimes I wonder if modern science has actually proven that matter is ‘nothing’. Think about it, if you look at an atom close enough under a powerful microscope, it becomes clear that it’s actually almost 100% open space!

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.

My father died in this way, but I do not know how.

My mother died suddenly due to a stroke. My father obviously became very sad and he said that he had always wished to die simultaneously with her. After less than a week he was dead too.

At that time he had a form of cancer and it was expected that he will live less than a year, but there was no sign that he might die so quickly.

He did not change any of his habits, e.g. he ate exactly like before. During the last 3 days he was hospitalized and apparently he was well taken care of, but that did not help.

Nevertheless, a week was enough for his wish to become true. It seems that he had some sort of renal failure and he died during the night, but how that happened is unknown.

In any case, after this personal experience I have no doubt that people can die when they are convinced that they should.

And I did not noticed this pattern in cemetery either.

It’s still a processes — there’s a period of grief and adjustment but I’ve seen it happen a few times.

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_Sen...

This oppressively nihilistic atmosphere has given many players solace during difficult times.

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.

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.

They're not without risks, but if you really think the alternative is that she dies in five years...

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.

She was ok until the moment tests confirmed it was covid. She developed shortness of breath and other symptoms.

All of those disappeared after reading to her the probabilities of hosp. and dying in her age/condition range.

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

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.

― Dr. Hiriluk One Piece(Manga and Anime)

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