How the relation between modern medicine, modern media and the supernatural has changed in the 21st century.
Human nature has always led for the want of more, people are inclined and want to believe there is a paranormal, a supernatural or hidden world to explore and escape too. This innate need to have a sense of more has been particularly seen in people who are diagnosed with mental illness’s such as ADHD, depression and dissociation disorder; and as modern media has grown to depict more and more of these supernatural or cryptozoological scenarios, there has been an increase in diagnosed patients who believe they are experiencing the paranormal in an acute way. This paper will look at the relation between modern medias content, the improvement in modern diagnoses and how society views the paranormal.
Throughout history, humanity has consistently documented various beings or phenomena that fit the criteria of being inhuman, for example the vampire. (History, 2018) Whilst often credited to Bram Stoker as the creator of Count Dracula, the reality is these cryptid creatures had been written about since Greek mythology, the tale of Ambrogio and Selena created the basis for the creature. After being cursed by the sun god Apollo, who wished for his fiancé, Selena, to never be able to step into the sun, Ambrogio took help from Hades and Artemis, who in turn gave him immortality, superhuman strength and fangs to kill animals for their blood as ink for love letters to Selena. But as punishment for stealing Artemis’s silver bow, could not touch the metal. Ambrogio eventually killed Selena so she could share his immortality and the idea of a vampire was born into Greek culture. This original creature spread into medieval Britain and became a scapegoat type persona for the plague, bad fortune or illness that effected a family often led to one of the family members being accused as a vampire by their village, which in turn, meant the village could kill the afflicted and rid themselves of ‘evil’ or more likely to take their land and belongings.
In a modern age, vampires can be quickly dismissed as nothing more superstition and popular culture characters, the rise of modern medicine has helped to prove that vampirism as a breed doesn’t exist, but can be attributed to illnesses (Dowling, 2018) such as porphyria, a blood disorder that can cause severe blisters on skin that’s exposed to sunlight, as a disease that may have been linked to the vampire legend. Some symptoms of porphyria can be temporarily relieved by ingesting blood. Other diseases blamed for promoting the vampire myth include rabies or goiter. The modern medicine diagnosis for these symptoms has proven that vampires as they were historically shown can be explained away, and gives a reasonable explanation to the documented encounters with ‘vampires’ throughout history. This argues in favour that modern media is not to blame for the increase of people believing in the supernatural as historically humans have always believed in this type of cryptozoological creature, without modern media there to influence them. Instead it shows the natural inclination to make something we don’t understand into a mythological creature that can be distanced from ourselves in an attempt to rationalize the unusual.
A wide assortment of paranormal convictions exist within various cultures, however phantoms and ghosts are undoubtedly the most widespread encounter, Benjamin Radford, representative supervisor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and creator of "Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries," (Radford, 2010) revealed to Business Insider. Part of the reason for this is that believing in ghosts may be related to a belief in the afterlife, (Tapani Riekki, 2018) a tenet of most major religions. Believing in the supernatural also has its roots in our desire to have control over our world, Radford explained. Another Gallup survey found that in sub-Saharan Africa, the greater part of individuals reviewed had faith in black magic, and the individuals who did would in general rate themselves as less positive than cynics.
A 2006 study by Matthew J. Sharps, Justin Matthews and Janet Asten on behalf of the department of psychology, California state University, (Sharps, Matthews and Asten, 2006) looked at the link between mental health and the likelihood that someone would passionately believe in the paranormal. They stated in their published journal for their hypothesis:
“Although the potential ramifications have been overblown in the popular media, specific aspects of ADHD, including hyperfocus, tendencies toward rapid task-shifting, and hyperactivity, would probably have been assets, rather than liabilities, in the ancient world of hunting and gathering (Hartmann, 1997). Sharps, Villegas, Nunes, and Barber (2002) found that specific cognitive aspects of the hunting world are still present and experimentally accessible in modern humans. We suggest that in some individuals, adaptations that may have been advantageous when humans were hunter-gatherers are still present and are potentially disadvantageous today. These individuals might be more attracted to a world of unknown animals and unexplored possibilities, in part as a refuge from the modern world to which specific aspects of their intellects and psyches are unsuited. We hypothesized that such individuals may be predisposed to beliefs in cryptids because these could represent unknown forms of life. However, we did not expect subclinical ADHD tendencies to be associated with similar beliefs in ghosts, telepathy, or astrology. Because these paranormal beliefs are irrelevant to hunting and related evolutionary processes, we did not expect them to appeal to people with tendencies toward ADHD.
We did not expect to find the same pattern of beliefs in people with symptoms of depression. Unknown animals might not hold special appeal for people with depression, but we hypothesized that potential avenues of escape from perceived difficulties would. Depressed individuals might be more likely to believe in ghosts, for example, because ghosts provide evidence for an afterlife in which present stress would be eliminated. We expected that belief in UFOs would be another avenue of escape for depressed inviduals. Thus, we hypothesized that individuals with subclinical tendencies toward depression would have elevated beliefs in the existence of UFOs and ghosts, but not in cryptids.
We hypothesized that a third psychological condition, dissociation, also influences paranormal beliefs. People in dissociative states feel separated in conscious awareness from ordinarily familiar information or emotional states. "Part of the person … is elsewhere and not available at the present time" (Maxmen & Ward, 1995, p. 310). Even at the subclinical levels addressed in the present article, people with dissociative tendencies feel somewhat removed from the everyday world of human experience. Individuals with dissociative tendencies exhibit diminished critical assessment of reality (Maxmen & Ward) and may have paranormal beliefs at higher levels than do individuals in the general population. However, we did not expect these tendencies to be more prevalent in one area of paranormal phenemona than in others.”
This papers argument on the link between mental health disorders and the belief in the paranormal was proved correct within their study, finding that people with undiagnosed, and therefore untreated, disorders had a natural inclination to believe in certain aspects of the bizarre. The study’s argument of why this was for each disorder tested fits with the historical documentation of the paranormal, in ages when medicine did not have a name for ADHD, depression or dissociative disorder, people that had these afflictions were among the masses in large numbers, and influenced the way people spread stories of the unexplained. If one person in a group had, for example, dissociation disorder, and had been attacked by an animal that they couldn’t recognize whilst in a dissociative state, they could have been more likely to tell the rest of their group they had been attacked by a monster, such as a werewolf, as they tried to make sense of the event.
Modern media’s depiction of horror and supernatural beings has helped differentiate between the real and the mythical for people who may experience these mental health states, as they can rule out what is fiction due to the access to media on the topic. For instance, the same person previously mentioned with dissociative disorder in the 21st century would know that the animal that attacked them was not in fact a werewolf as they know from media this isn’t a possible explanation and can go on to rationalize it as a rabid dog or wolf etc. Modern medias involvement is mentioned in Sharps, Matthews and Asten’s study (Sharps, Matthews and Asten, 2006) as they understand the variable that:
“it is important to note that we would not expect all individuals who express paranormal or cryptozoological beliefs or who are interested in these topics to have tendencies toward ADHD, depression, and dissociation. Individuals could arrive at these beliefs from a variety of directions and perspectives, ranging from familial or environmental media influences that spurred the interests to personal experiences with phenomena that were perceived to be paranormal. There are many reasons that people may become interested in atypical phenomena.”
The influence of modern media can be seen as a good thing for those that experience these events as they can help rationalize notions of paranormal, however, they can also influence a brain that experiencing high levels in adrenaline and fear to see things that aren’t really there. As the article “Strange face in the mirror illusion” (Neurobonkers.com, 2018) The popular game ‘Bloody Mary’ which involves chanting the name into a dimly lit mirror to summon the spirit of bloody Mary has been proven to be a case of misidentification, the brain fails to process what is truly being shown in the mirror due to the low light and expectancies of what will be seen, the adrenaline fuels the brain and what is seen is a horrifically distorted version of their own face, as Mary. Modern media’s depiction of Bloody Mary (Preludesblogofwords.blogspot.com, 2018) has led to the spread of the game and people trying it after watching a film or tv show about Bloody Mary, and as a result, seeing her in the mirror and thus believing in the supernatural after the fact.
The popular spread of belief in ghosts and other such creatures is due to the way our brains work, Barry Markovsky, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina, told Business Insider. (Business Insider, 2018) The human mind seeks patterns to make sense of ambiguous information. "Ghosts are almost always seen under ambiguous circumstances — such as in poor lighting, or when we're just waking up or falling asleep, when our senses are not at their peak function," Markovsky states. People who believe in ghosts are often in situations where they're expecting to see them (Tandfonline.com, 2018) , such as in a "haunted" house, Markovsky added, much like the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. Modern media has been found to influence the subconscious, people that experience sleep paralysis are more likely to experience horrific hallucinations if they had recently watched some form of horror based content (Restonic, 2018) .The images that are implanted in the brain come to the forefront of the mind when experiencing sleep paralysis, due to the fight or flight response flooding the brain with adrenaline, and as a result show the afflicted an image from the recent media content they had just consumed. Historically medicine hadn’t discovered sleep paralysis as a medical condition and led many people to hide their experiences from the public so as to avoid being labelled as insane and sent to an asylum, however as the understanding for sleep disorders and mental health has improved, along with knowledge of the condition being spread through media, people have become more open about their experiences and have opened up the conversation regarding the supernatural.
Michael Nees at the Lafayette College in Pennsylvania (Robson,2018) recently tasked a group of students to listen to sound recordings from US ghost-hunting shows. By inconspicuously suggesting to the volunteers with the thought that they were involved in a paranormal study brought up the number of voices they reported hearing in the vague recordings – going against the fact that they mostly reported being sceptics. It seems that the merest expectation of hearing something spooky can set the mind on a path that leads to the paranormal.
What all these various articles and journal studies have in common is the consensus that a predisposed notion that ghosts or cryptozoological creatures could exist give a higher chance that the person will at some point experience a paranormal encounter with said beings. The state of this person’s mental health works alongside modern media to influence the brain and suggest a bias as to what they are seeing, the combined factors create a scenario that is primed for mental manipulation. Haunted houses work off the fact that people expect to become scared or witness a ghost and use modern media and intimidation tactics to achieve these adrenaline rush. Their success supports the idea that mental health and media have a strong link to a person’s stance on the supernatural, if they are a horror fan or experience a mental illness that leads them for an escape (Sharps, Matthews and Asten, 2006) they naturally will be more inclined to believe in the paranormal.
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