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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.