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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."
You mention flickering fluorescent bulbs, but there's another fairly common cause of some of these symptoms you should check out if you ever come across a case like this; high-pitched whines from malfunctioning electronic devices.
I've both had exposure to this myself (via a crappy power transformer for a router) and come across others suffering from the same issue. Symptoms can include headaches, nausea, dizziness, sleep-loss and, if the exposure goes on for a prolonged period, long-term tinnitus. People's hearing ranges vary, so many people will be unaffected, but children and teenagers are particularly sensitive (though in some cases, as with me, adults remain capable of hearing these noises well into their 30s and 40s).
It's exactly the same as the theory behind those teenager-repelling "sonic stinger" devices that some shops and malls have deployed (whose use I personally think should be classed as a criminal assault). The sound causes pain to those susceptible to it, while others are oblivious. Most cases I've come across of malfunctioning devices or power-supplies are less immediately noticeable than a sonic stinger, but if you are susceptible, they are impossible to miss over time.
The good news is that in most cases, once the device has been identified, a quick power-supply swap usually eliminates the problem.
I'm not saying that this issue is the cause here, but I am of the view that when you hear reports of "Wi-Fi allergies", this is one of the first things you should check for. A lot of Wi-Fi routers, included ISP-supplied ones, ship with cheap and nasty power supplies that are highly prone to this (one batch of Virgin Media routers here in the UK made the news over this issue a few years back).
Of course, I've also come across people who were claiming to have Wi-Fi allergies who were clearly mentally ill rather than suffering from an external stimulus - there are generally clues in their wider behaviour.
Someone in my extended family had severe bipolar disorder which included hallucinations. As she became better medicated, she tried her best to grasp the difference between reality and what was going on in her bastard brain. Know what didn't help, though? Her mother upholding the belief that she had some sort of mystical connection to spirits. I couldn't give a fuck whether people have woowoo beliefs, but surely even someone engaged in woowoo understands that it is possible to be mentally ill, and for any hallucinations to be completely and merely the product of a faulty brain? God damn fucking "I want to believe" wins out every time, though, doesn't it?
Anyway, this wonderful person died by suicide last year. It wasn't BECAUSE of the above, as suicide is a complex fucking thing and it's extremely rare that one person's action/inaction is to blame for what is essentially a fatal symptom of an illness. But it didn't help.
Whenever something really bad happened on the ground, my late mother used to blame the space shuttle for flying in God's heaven as the cause. She also believed that the moon landing was a fake and celebrated the Skylab falling into the ocean.
Is this even such a thing.. .curious
Hypochondria is a real illness recognized in the DSM-IV. As far as anyone has ever proven scientifically, "EHS" is a fancy term with absolutely no real evidence. More or less like people who claim wind power makes them sick, it seems to come and go based on whether the victim believes the device is present and turned on. Which is very much like hypochondria...
Unfortunately, tell people their disease is mental, not physical and they are insulted and rage. When in fact mental diseases are real and certainly FEEL real to the person suffering from them. I find it far more likely that our brain can suffer from "idea viruses" that it takes far too seriously, than somehow our body is reacting to radio waves, when those same waves are, and have always been, present from our favorite daystar (and to a much lesser degree, all the other daystars shining at us).
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
You joke, I know, but perhaps this is really some social situation that nobody knows about, some kind of cyberbullying that she was exposed to that gave her such emotional anxiety that it produced physical symptoms.
The "wifi" connection could have been that the bullying was most intense where the people doing the bullying were together and had good network connectivity, which turned out to be at school.
Perhaps mom was never aware of it or daughter never was able to consciously face it, and once the anxiety and pain could be transferred to blaming the wifi signals, the daughter and the mom made that their focus and whatever was the real cause got buried or forgotten.
Obviously this is just a guess, but there has to be some other explanation besides EMF.
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?
This has already been done in multiple studies. People claiming allergy/sensitivity to WiFi, or nearby mobile network transmitters, have in experiments only had symptoms when they believed the transmitter was on, regardless of when the transmitter was actually on (source).
But, the human mind is good at rationalizing away such results if you already are convinced. You have a similar situation with a lot of people even here on Slashdot claiming they can easily hear the difference between lossless music formats and a quality 320 kbps lossy codec encoding, when all the double blind tests shows otherwise.
Well how would we go about treating them with dignity? We would have to give in to their unreasonable demands to turn off the wifi, would we not?
While there may be some evidence supporting these beliefs, I don't think it justifies any action as there is little / no proof that exposure to a typical wifi network causes acute harm, nor that a typical wifi network would be any less harmful then all the other nearby uses of radio that would be out of the schools control.
To me it seems like the best way to tackle the problem is not to dignify them, to let them know their "disease" doesn't exist. This seems like the sort of thing that only exists (at least in a way that causes significant symptoms) as placebo, hence if we can convince them they are wrong their symptoms should go away
I have a buddy who is an old-school radio ham, the kind who builds his own equipment and needs a huge tower to work the low frequencies that the service started out with a century ago.
Whenever he moves to the edge of a new town, his modus operandi is the same: he puts up the tower first, leaving all his gear crated.
After several weeks of complaints rolling in about impotence and dead pets, he invites the neighbors over to show them the crated, unpowered rig. Then he hams away in peace.
There is a similar story from the early Fifties of a town which handled the startup of its new water fluoridation plant in the same way.
This is a false premise. You don't need to be able to "sense" something for it to be happening or to be harmful to you. Like cosmic rays or x-rays, lead in the environment, etc. This often proposed test would only test if they could sense it, not that it is happening. Maybe some people are "more sensitive" than others anyway.
They did a study that found St. John's Wort no more effective than a placebo at treating depression. In that same study, they all tested Zoloft, which was also found to be no more effective than a placebo.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
Speaking as a parent with 3 kids on anti-depressants now, I'd guess the latter. For our first kid, that "mental illness" thing was a huge hump to get over. Not just for us either. My son just did not want to accept it (he can get like that). He thought it made him "crazy". I finally convinced him to go on meds as a practical matter. Depression has been shown to have a self-feeding effect. Bad episodes can alter your brain to make recurrence more likely. But once we'd gotten over that hump, it wasn't such a big deal with his siblings. So at least his turmoil perhaps helped make the transition easier for them. In my youngest's case, perhaps saved her life.
There's a lot of shame for families involved too, because it tends to run in families. I'm probably only talking about it openly because it appears to be my wife's side of the family with the history of it, rather than mine. You probably won't hear her talking about it this openly.
I went to a funeral of a friend who was suffering and committed suicide this past summer. My group of his friends didn't know about his problems at all, and his friends and family who did were all church people, and were trying to help him "pray it away". What really broke my heart was his note to them apologizing for not being good enough to do so. But they rationalized this was God's Will somehow. (I'm a believer myself, but if God sends you a boat, you don't stay praying, you get on the damn boat. This town is full of doctors who would have helped him in a minute).
So I'm not surprised at all that someone would refuse to admit their kid had depression, and even perhaps in extreme cases transfer all their shame and anger onto some other third party.
What's truly sad is that it doesn't have to be that way at all. So many people die and/or lose loved ones needlessly. Bipolar or Depression is usually just a brain chemical imbalance. Finding the right meds isn't always trivial, but it tends to be effective if you can stay on them. You just have to manage it carefully, kinda like having diabetes.
It really is a shame that we stigmatize mental illness and disorders like we do. If someone has a physical ailment like diabetes, nobody (apart form a few wackos who are safely ignored) would think there's something wrong with the person taking insulin or modifying their diet. However, if someone has a mental disorder, they are told to "just get over it" as if they woke up one day and said to themselves "Hey, I think I'll be depressed today."
When my son was diagnosed with Autism (not a mental illness, but gets grouped in there in many people's minds), my parents had a hard time accepting it. They still insist that he'll "grow out of it." What upset them even more was when I said that I was sure that I was autistic as well (just not diagnosed). They acted as though me being autistic was a bad judgement on their parenting. As if I was saying "Well, I'm autistic because you were horrible parents." If anything, I think it means they were better parents because they were dealing with something without knowing what it was and I still turned out pretty good. My wife and I have access to a lot more resources for my son than my parents had with me.
We're not going to be able to properly deal with mental illness and disorders until we stop stigmatizing people for having them.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.