negative NDE

The non-inevitability of hell: Not all “negative” NDEs are all that negative

December 3, 2012 By Nan Bush 48 Comments

As important as I believe it is to poke deeply into the relationship between religion and near-death and similar experiences, as we’ve been doing of late, I’m taking this post to go back to basics. Just what is a “distressing NDE” and does having one inevitably involve an encounter with hell?

What are we talking about? There are psychological events which are experienced as an encounter beyond physical existence. Being close to death is a fairly reliable trigger for this kind of happening, which has led to the term “near-death experience.” In actuality, nearly identical events occur under a wide variety of circumstances, including people who are in no danger of dying. The events may be called spiritually transformative experiences (STE), extraordinary human experiences (EHE), mystical experiences, religious or conversion experiences, or near-death experiences (NDE). however, because of its familiarity, I use the term “NDE” to apply broadly rather than exclusively. Yes, that is, strictly speaking, inaccurate; however, it’s efficient. Bear with me for the sake of word count!

“Negative NDE” as insight, vitality, developmental thrust?

March 7, 2012 By Nan Bush 4 Comments

May I suggest that you run, not walk, to Sheila Joshi’s Neuroscience and Psi blog, where her latest post is “Distressing psi is really misinterpreted insight, vitality, and developmental thrust.”

“I was very struck by how there are a handful of outpatient clinics in Europe and Argentina where people having distressing psychic or spiritual experiences can get help from professionals who are trained in both clinical psychology and parapsychology.

“In fact, I would go further and say that the data presented led me to think that the spontaneous psi experiences were distressing because they were being somewhat misinterpreted by the experiencers, and because they contained a developmental thrust that was very much wanted but which was also taboo. To me, these spontaneous experiences really seemed like shoves from the Tao / infinite self / personal unconscious / spirit guides – or some combination of them all!”

An immediate question is, why has this information been so quiet–or so missing entirely–in North America?

The post also notes,

“The idea that distressing psychic / spiritual experiences might be driven by some kind of need to take the next step in one’s development parallels the strand in the history of psychology / psychiatry that has seen psychosis in a similar light. John Weir Perry at the Diabasis center, R.D. Laing, C.G. Jung, Kazimierz Dąbrowski, the Anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s, the Spiritual Emergency Network in the 1980s, etc. have avowed that psychosis is a crisis accompanied by much distortion, yes, but it is also an opportunity for radical healing if it is also interpreted as a source of truth and vitality.

“Why do these developmental thrusts appear in such negative guise, for example, as distressing psi or as psychosis? One important reason…is that they involve change in self boundaries or ego … And, unfortunately, we tend to fear this and fight it tooth and nail, even if it’s for our eventual greater happiness.”

Read the entire post here:

http://neuroscienceandpsi.blogspot.com/2012/03/distressing-psi-is-really.html

By the numbers, #3: Hospital studies

September 30, 2011 By Nan Bush 7 Comments

In the first post of this series, I posed the question, how can it be that in the hospital-based studies, where participants are closer to death, the reports of distressing NDEs are at zero percent, and percentages of pleasant NDEs are typically 20% lower than in studies of the general population? Shouldn’t all those rates be higher, or are healthy people making up stories? These are the academic researchers who know how to do studies expertly; should we trust their data more?

In hospitals, we assume, a fair number of patients are close to death. It only makes sense, then, that hospitals would be where most NDEs occur. A great many accounts bear that out, as experiencers describe their surgery-associated NDE or what they have seen of the ER during an out-of-body episode. That has certainly been the assumption on which the hospital-based studies were designed: Go where the subjects will be. For an even richer sample, if you want a population that is unequivocally near death, study NDEs of people in cardiac arrest. Makes sense.

Unfortunately, sometimes “sense” doesn’t pan out.

Consider the following scatter chart. (Please do. In near-death studies, where quantifiable data is so hard to come by, any piece of numerical information is downright thrilling.) I can hear some of you wailing with excitement; but don’t worry, the chart simply gives a useful sense of what was where, and when.

The red dots indicate reports of distressing NDEs published in reputable journals; black squares indicate studies reporting 0% distressing NDEs; the left column shows the approximate percentage of dNDE accounts in each study; and the bottom row shows the year the study was published. An “H” (which is registering here as a blob) below a black square indicates a hospital study. My apologies for the blurry translation from .jpg to WordPress image.

Black = 0% dNDE (of 331 NDE) Red = % dNDE (148 of 1024 NDE) ?*= May be as high as

Studies: 1975, Moody; 1978, Rawlings; 1979, Garfield; 1980, Ring; 1981, Evergreen; 1982, Gallup, Sabom; 1983, Bush; 1985, Grey; 1987, Sutherland; 1992, Atwater; 1993, Rawlings; 1995, Serdahely; 2000, Rommer; 2001, Knoblauch, Parnia, vanLommel; 2003, Greyson; 2005, Schwaninger Note: Total of dNDEs and the average percentage given here differ from those on the previous tables because not all those studies reported percentages.

* The Gallup study reported 1% hellish NDEs but as many as 28% in some way unpleasant.

This chart is what I mean about how sometimes questions absolutely jump off a chart. Why, with all those red dots indicating the existence of distressing NDEs (332 of them in those studies), did no hospital study report finding a single one? For that matter, why is it that the reported incidence of any NDE is lower in the hospital studies than in studies of the general population?

I believe that four principal issues can explain the disparity. First, why do hospital studies report so many fewer NDEs than general studies?

1) Research design and stringency of study criteria. The general studies (non-hospitalized participants, often self-selected) have largely been designed to answer questions like, “What is an NDE?” They provided the original first-person testimony establishing the existence of near-death experience, with some attention to demographic information. The general studies have been retrospective (including NDEs both recent and decades in the past), inclusive of all reported circumstances. What they may indicate is the prevalence of NDEs; that is, how many people are likely to have an NDE over the course of their lifetime no matter what the circumstances.

By contrast, the hospital studies have observed much stricter research protocols. They are prospective studies (catching any NDEs shortly after they occur). As described by Bruce Greyson (The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences), what these studies have reported is what the medical field terms the incidence of NDEs: that is, the number of NDEs reported by a specific group (the study participants) who were admitted to the study according to their recent experience of predefined medical conditions, so that it is possible to be relatively certain that the NDEs being reported occurred in the context of that condition. In other words, how many people in a strictly defined medical condition are likely to report having an NDE.

It’s like tea strainers: Prospective studies have a finer “mesh” than general studies. The finer the mesh (the tighter the study requirements), the fewer tea leaves in the cup (and the fewer the experiences in the study).

2. The nature of the population being studied. However ardently the participants in a general study believe they were close to death—and not all do—there is usually no objective information to say their perception is correct. Many of them were basically healthy, although perhaps injured or with a temporary illness.

By contrast, in the five hospital studies here, the study participants are known to have been clinically dead and resuscitated, many of them with multiple serious health conditions. Contrary to what TV shows routinely indicate, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, is hardly a cure-all. One recent study in the United Kingdom reported that even with optimum conditions, following CPR the immediate survival rate was 38.6%, with 24.7% surviving 24 hours later, 15.9% alive to be discharged, and 11.3% surviving at 12 months. American Heart Association figures show that of witnessed in-hospital cardiac arrests, 48% survived immediate CPR, with 22% surviving long enough to be discharged.

In short, these are desperately ill folks, many of whom die well before survey interviewers can get to them. Of those who survive to participate, well under one in five is still alive a year later, around the time the study is concluding its follow-up interviews. They have not lived long enough for a researcher to report their experiences. And this brings us to the third reason and fourth reasons I believe there are so few distressing near-death experiences in the hospital studies:

3. As has been reported consistently, it takes a long time for people who have had a distressing NDE to be ready to talk about it. But given the statistics above, by the time people with an NDE coincident with cardiac arrest might be ready to reveal their distressing experience, most of them have died.

4. Going with this disclosure issue is one more, which is the matter of trust. The most satisfactory information appears to come under four circumstances: a) when NDErs are interviewed well after the experience, b) in an informal setting, c) with no time constraints, and d) by a person they trust. Cherie Sutherland was clear in Transformed by the Light that trust is essential for the revelation of intensely personal confidences. That empathy enabled the charismatic physician Barbara Rommer to report that even in her early interviews she was already finding “accounts that were very frightening.” The hospital studies, on the other hand, a) initiated questioning shortly after the cardiac arrest, b) were in a formal clinical setting, c) in circumstances that could not afford leisurely questioning, d) by people with whom most patients had no genuine personal relationship. It is worth remembering Carol Zaleski’s quoting the comment of a hospitalized NDEr: “I’ll be damned if I share my feelings about death and dying with anyone who makes 2-minute U-turns at the foot of my bed.”

To repeat: Even the best-designed study cannot draw out an NDE, particularly a distressing one, if the person is not ready or able to talk.

Please note: These are my opinions. Clinicians or NDErs who have an alternative to any part of my explanation are invited to post their views.

And a P.S.: The dots and squares on that chart show all the reputable journal-published studies of near-death experiences over the 30 years 1975-2005. You may wonder “Why so few?” There is a short answer: No funding. We’ve come a long way, baby, but it’s an even longer way to mainstream acceptance.

By the numbers, #2

September 24, 2011 By Nan Bush 5 Comments

Maybe you have to be a numbers geek to be interested in the previous post, but I find the numbers fascinating. Not the numbers themselves, but what they suggest (and some seem to shout). That post was simply tables showing the incidence of distressing NDEs in studies published in responsible journals between 1975 and 2005. Questions nearly jump off the pages. For instance:

1. The early attention. Where were the distressing experiences in the early reports of near-death experience? Were the major researchers hiding something? Did the distressing NDEs only start later?

2. Hospital studies. How can it be that in the hospital-based studies, where participants are closer to death, the reports are of zero dNDEs and percentages of pleasant NDEs are typically 20% lower than in studies of the general population? Shouldn’t all those rates be higher, or are healthy people making up stories? These are the academic researchers who know how to do studies expertly; should we trust their data more?

3. Why that 1% rumor? With a thorough literature review showing that on average almost one in five reported NDEs has been distressing, why is it that for over two decades almost everyone has said that only 1% of NDEs are “negative”?

I’ll start with the first question now and deal with the second and third in the next two posts.

Where were distressing experiences in the early studies of near-death experience?

They were there but invisible. The reasons for the silence are relatively simple and understandable.

Researchers. Nowadays, we are pretty much used to NDEs. Although the great majority of them are still wonderful and life-shaping, and they bring comfort to millions of people who hear about them, today’s pleasure and reassurance seem pale compared to the stunning sense of hope and mystery when people were first hearing about them. Audiences and researchers alike were simply transfixed. Researchers are certainly not immune to the same hopes and anxieties as the rest of humanity, and what these researchers wanted to know about specifically were the glorious NDEs, the peaceful ones, the ones that sounded like heaven.

One answer, then, about why dNDEs were invisible comes from this: what questions did the researchers ask? Their eyes were so intently fixed on happily transformative experiences, it didn’t occur to them to ask about anything unpleasant; and if it did occur to them to wonder, it seemed they didn’t really want to know enough to add those inquiries. This can be considered humanly understandable or, less kindly, as researcher bias.

Further, it was still so early in the NDE research game, interviewers weren’t quite certain how far it was all right to probe. As many of the experiencers being interviewed were in fragile health, no responsible investigator wanted to go in like a SWAT team, asking challenging questions that might be harmful. What if tough questions precipitated another experience and this time the person actually died?

Experiencers themselves. In the years we’re talking about, roughly 1975 to 1982, NDEs were still considered “iffy” in terms of mental health. For psychotherapists and physicians, one big question was whether these were psychotic events. Experiencers often contacted the IANDS office anonymously, afraid of being too self-revealing. No matter what the method of communication, an experiencer’s most common opening statement was, “I hope you won’t think I’m crazy, but…”

The days of wide-open websites were far in the future; reporting an NDE was considered so intensely private that in setting up the first NDE account archive, IANDS promised three different levels of security to safeguard contributor confidentiality. And all these cautions were about the pleasurable experiences! If blissful experiences were considered so hush-hush, imagine the secrecy and anxiety, not to mention the shame, around a frightening experience!

Even today, put yourself in the experiencer’s place: Knowing what people speculate and wonder about dNDEs, would you want to go public with a terrifying near-death account? The reluctance of experiencers to describe their dNDEs is why, when psychiatrist Bruce Greyson and I began pulling together experience accounts for the first study of distressing NDEs, it took ten years to collect the 50 narratives that made up our study sample. Even the best -designed study will not bring out experience accounts until people are ready to talk about them.

The audience and media. In that first decade, the Big Four of researchers were Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, and George Gallup. Their books dominated the scene. Maurice Rawlings did well in conservative Christian circles with his books about hell, but they did not hit the mainstream as the others did. And the media, riding high on stories of blissful NDEs, were in no hurry to stop the torrent. The few other mentions of difficult NDEs were in journal articles, not books, and never claimed much in the way of public attention.

Overall, the result is what we have seen: mystery and invisibility surrounding distressing near-death experiences.

Next time: The hospital studies.

Coping with a difficult NDE

May 12, 2011 By Nan Bush 7 Comments

In a book I was reading today, the author was saying that the effects of a traumatic NDE can be dealt with by a long series of therapeutic exercises. I believe he’s right. I also believe that most experiencers do not have the time, the interest in reliving their torment, nor the financial means to undergo years of therapy in order to integrate the experience.

What are your thoughts? Would it be worth getting past the questions, the anxiety, the emotional and spiritual torment, to be “fixed”? Would you do that?

Why not “negative” near-death experience?

April 14, 2011 By Nan Bush 7 Comments

Happy near-death experiences are considered positive. Why don’t I call unhappy ones negative?

Simple. Because “negative” suggests bad as opposed to good. And that is just plain misleading. It’s a characterization rather than a description.

A distressing NDE is emotionally painful, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It hurts, but hurting often leads to discovering the source of a problem and getting past it. Pain is a symptom, not an end. Worked with carefully, a horrifying NDE can lead to near-miraculous changes of understanding and attitudes with good outcomes. Not negative at all.

On the other hand, a blissful NDE feels great at the time, but if it leads afterward to ego-inflation and an attitude of superiority (which is not uncommon, at least temporarily), or to excessive risk-taking or abandonment of family responsibilities, then, although happy in the moment, it was not genuinely a positive experience but destructive.

Recommendation: Dump “negative.” Instead, use a more specific adjective that actually describes what the experience was like: distressing, frightening, scary, painful, empty, threatening, hellish. If you use a different word, send it in a comment; we’ll start a list of all the adjectives people use to describe their NDEs.