MIDDLE TENNESSEE SKEPTICS

Giving Common Sense a Chance    

     By now most of America has seen the Oscar winning movie A Beautiful Mind based on biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr written by Sylvia Nasar.  For half of the movie, the audience joined John in his hallucinations and delusions.  They, like John, could not tell what was real and what was imaginary.  Even when they were told his delusions were not real, many still weren't sure who was real and who was imaginary.

    John, the Noble Prize winner in 1994 in Economics, suffered with a disease of the mind known as schizophrenia, an ailment that all most people believe is rare.  That would be VERY wrong.

    According to Barlow and Durand (1) schizophrenia is widespread and affects nearly one out of every hundred people.  The symptoms are complex and involve a combination of disorders involving hallucinations, delusions, and disorders of speech, emotion, and socialization.

Did you ever think someone called your name, only to discover that no one was there? Did you ever think

       you saw something move by you, yet nothing did? We all have fleeting moments when we think we see or

       hear something that isn't there.  However, for many people with schizophrenia, these perceptions are very

       real and occur on a regular basis.  The experience of sensory events without any input from the surround-

       ing environment is called an hallucination.

A belief that would be seen by most members of a society as a misprepresentation of reality is called a

      delusion.

-  Barlow & Durand

    An equally surprising disorder is Folie A Deux (shared psychotic disorder) a condition in which other people develop delusions due to a close relationship with the delusional individual. Since many researchers believe that schizophrenia has a strong hereditary component, it is not unreasonable to expect that hallucinations in one family member may often mani-fest themselves in other members.

     Barlow and Durand wrote their book in 1999.  With the advances in science one would suspect that the question "What is schizophrenia" would be answered by now.  They respond "It is not.  The cost of caring for people with schizophrenia in the U.S. was estimated to be between $16 and $19 billion for 1990 alone, which was 2.5% of the total health care expenditures in the U.S. that year."

     Schizophrenia is frequently proposed as an explanation for a phenomenon known as poltergeists.  No proof exists because of the complexity and lack of understanding of schizophrenia and the extreme difficulty in doing critical research in incidents of poltergeist manifestations.  Invariably, these cases are sensationalized thereby obscuring the potential for real analysis or referred to psychic researchers with a less than objective agenda.

     Imagine now a pioneer family living around the turn of the nineteenth century in the superstitious community of Adams, Tennessee.  Everything that governed their daily existence was explained in the bible.  Now interject concepts from the movie A Beautiful Mind, replacing John Nash by Betsy Bell. What explanation does this family, this community arrive at from the study of their bible?  That Betsy is suffering from schizophrenia or that there is demonic presence.

     Continuing with this logical exercise, since the existence of demonic activity has NEVER been validated in the last two centuries while schizophrenia has, which explanation is most probable for the Bell Witch Legend? 

Footnotes:

1) Barlow, D and Durand V., "Perspectives on the Concept of Schizophrenia," Abnormal Psychology: An Introduction, Wadsworth Pub. Co, 1999, p 405.