Slashdot Mirror
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?
Whenever my WiFi goes down I feel sad and depressed.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
At this point, they've ignored all scientific evidence. Testing them won't change their minds. Nothing will.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Everybody knows that the wifi protocol was defined in RFC-666. They'll tell you that RFC stands for 'request for comment,' but we know it stands for 'Refuse the Father and Christ.'
Use this handy chart to decode what YOUR kids are REALLY saying:
Don't even get me started on Monster Energy drinks.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.
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.
Well clearly then the problem isn't that there's power going through it. The metal structure itself acts as an antenna, so it's the tower, powered or unpowered, that is at fault there.
I'm just surprised your friend hasn't run into that objection yet.