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Mother Blames Wi-Fi Allergy For Daughter's Suicide (telegraph.co.uk)
An anonymous reader sends news that a UK woman named Debra Fry has begun a campaign to raise awareness for "electro-hypersensitivity" (EHS) after the suicide of her daughter, Jenny, earlier this year. Fry says her daughter was allergic to Wi-Fi, and blames Jenny's school for not removing wireless routers and other networking equipment. A 2005 report from the World Health Organization said, "EHS has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure. Further, EHS is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem." School officials were firm in declining to remove the equipment without solid evidence supporting Fry's claims. A public health official said, "The overall scientific evidence does not support the suggestion that such exposure causes acute symptoms or that some people are able to detect radiofrequency fields. Nevertheless effective treatments need to be found for these symptoms."
Sad story, a mothers crazy notions about what was causing her daughters illness, leads daughter to assume its true. Kids trust their parents about these things. There is very little difference between a real medical condition and one you believe you are having. The school though, should have looked into getting both of them psychological help.
Daughter kills herself, mother wants to blame everyone but herself.
If the mother really believed in the condition, why wasn't she home schooling the daughter after the school refused to remove the equipment on a whim? Also, what the hell did they do about their neighbours etc and why did the daughter have a mobile phone?! Did the creators of the 802.11 spec magically choose the single frequency that affected this girl, among all the billions of others?
I think the point is we need better treatments for mental illnesses. Seeing hallucinations for instance, you can easily say "Well its not there". But the person still needs treatments.
Uh, symptoms can be perfectly real while the diagnosis can be at fault - were the fluorescent bulbs in particular parts of the school cycling at a slightly odd frequency causing her to feel ill rather than being affected by wifi? Same symptoms, different diagnosis.
Someone may be dying of cancer while blaming the devil for their illness - the problem is real and still needs to be treated, while the diagnosis is bollocks.
Yet the article says she texted friends. A cell phone is much more powerful than wifi...
Sad. But probably not caused by wifi.
Instead of simply looking down on and being mean to those people, wouldn't it be better to give them a "test for WiFi allergy", wherein wifi is randomly enabled or shut off and they have to indicate how they're feeling? When it's done you show them that they did no better than random and thus aren't allergic. Then they feel they're not being treated as an idiot, yet also feel that they've been tested for it and shown not to have it - even if they choose to believe that such an allergy can exist. Even if this only gets a fraction of these people to stop complaining, it's a win, right?
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
This article all but proves that wi-fi or some supposed wi-fi allergy had nothing to do with this. From the article:
"Jenny’s mother, Debra Fry, said her daughter suffered with tiredness, headaches and bladder problems as a direct result of wireless internet connections at Chipping Norton School. "
All three of those symptoms are also well-known symptoms of depression: the tiredness caused by the loss of energy and changes in sleep from the depression itself, and the headaches and bladder problems probably caused by malnutrition due to changes in diet caused by depression. I'm honestly surprised the article didn't interview a psychiatrist about this, because I can guarantee any psychiatrist worth their title would tell them that all of these things are signs of depression and that the mother should have gotten help right away.
What it makes me wonder is if the mother did go to a doctor who told her that the symptoms were caused by a "wi-fi allergy" or if she simply deluded herself into thinking it because she didn't want to admit that her daughter had depression. In either case, someone should probably be charged with murder.
At this point, they've ignored all scientific evidence. Testing them won't change their minds. Nothing will.
Grieving parents will often look for a reason, no matter how unlikely. It's not crazy to try to prevent others from having the same situation.
So we have cyber bullying, wifi sensitivity and a host of other causes that need to be addressed for the sake of our children.
No one wants to admit that their child was depressed and they couldn't think of a way to handle the problem other than taking their own life.
"That would be unethical, both because you're hawking fraudulent tests, but also because you're encouraging people to believe that their delusion is accepted ..."
Priests have no problem with such a deception.
Cyber-bullying and WiFi sensitivity are two entirely different phenomenon
It is easy to demonstrate that negative influences of a peer group have an effect regardless the medium that the negativity is delivered with, provided that the recipient can read, listen, watch the material
There is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that people are sensitive to WiFi and plenty of evidence of demonstrating WiFi sensitivity if the THINK there is WiFi active, even if there is not exposure to WiFi
Some parents fall in love of the idea of their children have 'conditions', and then subjecting their children to endless bullshit while taking them to quack doctor after quack doctor where the parent bathes in recognition of their awesomeness and the child is repeated identified as defective
The mother and the quacks drove the child to isolation and suicide, the WiFi had nothing to do with it
Apparently not. FTFA "Jenny Fry, 15, was found in woodland near her home in Chadlington, on June 11 this year after texting a friend telling her she would not be going to school and intended to kill herself. " I'm sure the cell phone on her person is blasting out all kinds of RF.
"That would be unethical, both because you're hawking fraudulent tests, but also because you're encouraging people to believe that their delusion is accepted ..."
Priests have no problem with such a deception.
There's a huge difference between being deliberately deceptive, and spreading a belief that you yourself devoutly believe in, that happens to also be false.
And if you seriously believe that more than a tiny fraction of priests don't believe in the religion they preach (to the extent that it would be fair to call them deliberately deceptive) then you're an idiot, and probably waaaay too angry at the world in general.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
This lady was trying to get the network equipment removed long before her daughter's suicide. I'm sure the root cause was all the bullying she received for having a crazy ass mother.
Instead of simply looking down on and being mean to those people, wouldn't it be better to give them a "test for WiFi allergy", wherein wifi is randomly enabled or shut off and they have to indicate how they're feeling?
That would suck for the people who are actually trying to use the Wi-Fi.
They would then come up with some sort of bullshit explanation for why they failed the test. Like "Oh, the damage in the body takes awhile to build up and manifest itself. Wi-Fi is on, but she feels fine? She hasn't been exposed to it long enough to have a noticeable effect. Wi-Fi is off, but she is still feeling unwell? Of course, she hasn't had time to make a full recovery yet."
These are arguments and mindsets that do not have rationality behind them, so rational arguments trying to convince them are unlikely to work. People who believe in Wi-Fi sickness hold onto it, and that belief is more akin to a religious fervor. If you try to shoot holes in their arguments, they will repeatedly move the goalposts. Now that the child is dead, there's no way, no way at all to test her "electrical sensitivity," so the parents will always be able to hold onto that. There will be no convincing.
It's been well over a decade since Andrew Wakefield's study on Thimerosal and Autism was roundly debunked, and it was the only study to ever show any link to vaccines. Yet the vaccines == autism belief is alive and well. Expect ESD to not go away any time soon, even though it's easier to test and debunk.
The kid had Crazy Parents Syndrome (CPS) and so she killed herself. See, it's a real medical condition because I gave it a TLA.
It's very likely what the daughter was actually suffering from was depression. The symptoms that the kooky mom attributed to WiFi were actually symptoms of depression. This isn't a case of blaming the WiFi after the suicide, it was blaming the WiFi all along for the daughter's depression symptoms. Instead of treating the depression, the mom went in the opposite direction and convinced the daughter her symptoms were due to external forces and focused energy on a futile battle with the school, thus exacerbating the depression and driving her to suicide. So most likely if the mom had been a responsible, non-idiotic parent and had taken the daughter to a psychologist for therapy rather than blaming WiFi, the daughter would still be alive. Therefore it is the mom's fault.