When Gaslighting Psychiatric Mudslinging Defames Healthy NDE and OBE Observers

 In my 2023 post "Its News App Makes Apple Rather Like Orwell's Ministry of Truth"  I complained about the appalling materialist bias of the Apple News app that is a core feature of the very widely used I-Pad device. I wrote this:

"This interface is a masterpiece from an ease-of-use standpoint. With this interface I can access many hundreds of stories on 30 or more topics without typing anything and without ever using a mouse. The News app of the Apple iPad is so easy to use, and has access to so many stories that I would imagine a typical iPad user probably spends 30% or more of his iPad time only using the News app. 

But there is a huge problem with Apple's News app. The News app  restricts you to a very limited number of information sources. It therefore acts as a very severe 'reality filter,'  extremely restricting the type of articles that you will read when using its interface, and severely restricting the type of viewpoints you will be exposed to....

What Apple's News app has done is to pretty much restrict me to articles that parrot the 'official party line' of America's ruling class of politicians, professors and pundits, and also a vast variety of entertainment articles and articles such as sports articles and real estate articles and celebrity-oriented articles. What's wrong with that? Well, for one thing there is the problem that the stories that I get from the News app are very often stories filled with very bad  falsehoods, misrepresentations and groundless boasts. This is largely because nowadays the articles of so-called 'science news' are very often articles filled with errors and misstatements."

In 2025 we had an example of the appalling materialist propaganda so common in the Apple News app. It was a Junk Medicine article offering very bad medical advice, and very bad misinformation on the topic of out-of-body experiences. The article was a very shameful example of gaslighting and psychiatric mudslinging, in which attempts are made to defame healthy observers, by trying to insinuate that they have mental problems. 

The article started out with the false headline "75% of People Will Have an Out-of-Body Experience. How to Tell If You've Had One."  The percentage cited is not correct. The table below lists various surveys trying to determine the percentage of people who have out-of-body experiences. The average percentage of people saying they had such experiences is about 25%.

From the very beginning, the article gives us false information. It starts out stating this: "Dissociation refers to an out-of-body experience that can make you feel detached from yourself or reality." No, dissociation is not an out-of-body experience. 

Below are some definitions of "dissociation":

• The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "dissociation" as  "The separation of whole segments of the personality (as in dissociative identity disorder) or of discrete mental processes (as in schizophrenia) from the mainstream of consciousness or of behavior."
• Asked for a definition of "dissociation," Google gives this: "Dissociation is a mental process where a person disconnects from their thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity."
• Psychiatry.org says, "Dissociation is a disconnection between a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions or sense of who he or she is."
• The American Psychological Association's dictionary defines dissociation as "a defense mechanism in which conflicting impulses are kept apart or threatening ideas and feelings are separated from the rest of the psyche."

None of these things have anything to do with an out-of-body experience. An out-of-body experience is an experience in which an observer says that he seemed to be outside of his physical body. Typically the beginning of such an experience involves viewing the body from outside it, from a position such as two meters away, or a position at the top of a ceiling. Out-of-body experiences typically occur as sudden surprises, and often are part of near-death experiences (which may or may not include an out-of-body experience). The diagram below shows the relation between out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences. 

An out-of-body experience very often occurs suddenly during some experience in which a person is having a close brush with death, such as when someone is having a heart attack or cardiac arrest. Other out-of-body experiences may occur suddenly when someone is not having a close encounter with death. For example, a person may wake up from sleep and be very surprised to find that he seems to be observing his body from outside of it. A small number of people claim to be able to have out-of-body experiences through conscious effort in which they are trying to have such experiences. 

 

There is no evidence that out-of-body experiences have anything to do with any type of mental illness. But very shamefully, the Apple News article is all about trying to make people who have had out-of-body experiences think that they have some type of mental illness.  It immediately gives us a section entitled "Symptoms" which includes these items:

• "Feeling like you're outside of looking down at, or floating above your own body"
• "Apathy"
• "Emotional numbness"
• "Disconnection from those around you"
• "Feelings like your surroundings aren't real"
• "Time feels like it's moving too fast or too slow"
• "Memory loss"
• "Not remembering how you got to a specific place"
• "Having flashbacks that feel like you're living them in the present moment"
• "Being absorbed in a fantasy-like world that feels real"
• "Hearing muffled voices or seeing bright lights"
• "Depressive moods"
• "Anxious thoughts"

Notice the shameful strategy. In the bullet list some of the observational features of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are mixed up with various psychiatric symptoms. Similar shameful psychiatric mudslinging might go on if you were to have a bullet list listing mostly psychiatric symptoms, a list that included items such as "hoping that tax rates are increased on billionaires" and "worrying about the homeless," with the goal being to create the impression or insinuation that people with liberal or progressive ideas are mentally ill. 

We are then told "dissociation can often be an underlying symptom of mental health conditions." We then have a "Causes" section that mostly lists a bunch of psychiatric conditions such a "dissociative identity disorder," "depersonalization/derealization disorder (DPDD)," "dissociative amnesia," "borderline personality disorder," "schizophrenia," "post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)," "depression," "panic disorder," "stress," and "epilepsy."

Then there's a Diagnosis section, in which the reader is instructed that if he is experiencing any of the items listed in the "Symptoms" section (which include some of the features of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences), then he should go to his primary care physician so that such a doctor can refer him to a psychiatrist. 

The article is the worst type of gaslighting and psychiatric mudslinging. The advice given is terrible junk-medicine advice. There is not the slightest reason why anyone having an out-of-body experience or a near-death experience should consult a psychiatrist. There is no evidence that such experiences are symptoms of any type of mental illness.  The Apple News article provides no evidence whatsoever of an association between mental illness and either out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences. No such association exists. The people reporting near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are in general normal and healthy people.  There is no credible explanation of how any kind of mental illness could be the cause of their reports. 

Sociologist Paige Sweet defines gaslighting as "making someone seem or feel unstable, irrational and not credible, making them feel like what they’re seeing or experiencing isn’t real, that they’re making it up, that no one else will believe them.” The visual below shows two examples of gaslighting:

The visual below shows two other examples of gaslighting:

The type of gaslighting that has occurred in the Apple News article is the same type of shameful gaslighting that is practiced by the lawyers of rapists, who try various rhetorical tricks to try to make reliable rape victims sound like unreliable witnesses. 

Similar to gaslighting is what we can call psychiatric mudslinging. Psychiatric mudslinging is an attempt to shame, defame or silence a witness by falsely trying to insinuate that the person has mental problems. When psychologists or psychiatrists engage in psychiatric mudslinging, they are abusing their professional skills, and betraying the public's trust of them. When psychiatric mudslinging occurs, someone who was trained to help people becomes like some sniper, trying to hurt people. 

The author of the Apple News article should be deeply ashamed of having written this egregious piece of gaslighting and psychiatric mudslinging, as should a psychiatrist who has approved this Junk Medicine article trying to suggest that people having near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences should seek psychiatric treatments, despite a lack of any evidence that such experiences are symptoms of mental problems. Financial conflicts-of-interest may explain the psychiatrist's action here. The more people go to psychiatrists, the more money psychiatrists make. 

Another bogus article on out-of-body experiences is to be found in a recent university press release with the phony title "An Explanation for Out-of-Body Experiences." Count this as Example #1001 of a university press making utterly groundless boasts.  What has gone on  for years is that universities and colleges have been issuing groundless boasts and flagrantly untrue information in press releases designed to hype some newly released study done by scientists at such institutions.  So, for example, if there is a University of Eastern California, the press office of such a university will tend to follow an "anything goes" policy when trying to publicize newly research done by scientists at such a university. Almost always, the press releases are anonymous without any named author.  This allows some PR worker at a university press office to be uninhibited about lying, because he knows that no one will track him down as the person guilty of the lies he is telling. 

We hear about a survey of 500 people, but we get no specific details about any results. The press release claims, "The scientists found that the OBE experiencers were more frequently diagnosed with mental health conditions than those who had not had an OBE." But we are given no data substantiating this claim.  Claims like this are worthless unless you are told what a difference was. Were the OBE experiencers 5% more frequently diagnosed with mental health conditions, or was it only 1% more? We do not know, because no specific difference is mentioned. 

We may safely assume that no significant difference was found, because whenever a study finds any kind of meaningful difference, it will almost always give us a specific number mentioning the difference. So, for example, if a scientist is doing some study testing whether pornography  leads to criminality, and he finds a decent-sized difference such as 5%, he will almost always discuss the exact difference he found.  The only time when scientists fail to list a specific difference is when they found some negligible "means nothing" difference such as 1% or 2%.  Then typically the scientist will try to hide the trifling difference he found, by merely saying that he "found a difference" without telling what the difference was. 

We are referred to a paper ("Are out-of-body experiences indicative of an underlying psychopathology?") behind a paywall, incorrectly described by the press release as an "Open Access" paper.  The part of the paper that is publicly accessible consists of an abstract and some snippets. Neither of these mentions any specific difference between the mental health of those having out-of-body experiences and those not having them. The paper refers to "group difference in psychopathological profile between OBErs and non-OBErs" but gives us no specific data to indicate that those having out-of-body experiences are more likely to suffer mental health problems. The publicly accessible abstract and snippets of the paper states "we found that individuals reporting OBEs exhibited statistically worse mental health scores and a higher prevalence of psychiatric diagnoses compared to non-OBErs," failing to provide a single number to back up such claims. 

It is the same rule for scientific paper abstracts as for press releases: almost invariably whenever a study finds any non-negligible numerical difference it was attempting to find, it will  report in its abstract a specific figure telling us how much that difference was. Whenever a paper abstract or press release merely reports there was a difference without giving us any number telling us how much that difference was, we can assume with high confidence that the study found no difference worth mentioning, and that the authors were trying to prevent people from easily finding out about how tiny or negligible the difference was. 

We can actually take the paper as rather good evidence that there is no difference between the mental health of those reporting out-of-body experiences and those not reporting them, on the grounds that the study failed to report in its abstract a specific numerical difference,  which it only would have done if no difference or only the tiniest difference was found. 

We should also realize that if some academic researchers were to find some small difference in mental health outcomes between those having an out-of-body experience and those not having such experiences, almost certainly the result would not be an indicator of any real difference in mental health, but instead merely a reflection of attempts to pathologize those reporting experiences that psychiatrists and psychologists cannot explain, and a reflection of bias against the objective analysis of such persons. For example, what is the result when psychiatrists produce biased types of surveys in which those confessing to facets of out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences are classified as having a higher pathology score? The result, of course, would be some ability to report a higher pathology for such people. Similarly, if psychologists are creating Political Anxiety Syndrome surveys in which confessing to be worried about homelessness and poverty causes you to score higher, then people caring about homelessness and poverty will be wrongly analyzed as people having more mental problems. 

The paper here ("Measuring dissociation: Comparison

of alternative forms of the dissociative

experiences scale") gives us at its end the questions used for something called the Dissociative Experiences Scale, a questionnaire that is claimed to be a way of detecting a psychiatric syndrome called "dissociation."  One of the questions asks about out-of-body experiences. The question is: "Some people sometimes have the experience of feeling as though they are standing next to themselves or watching themselves do something and they actually see themselves as if they were looking at another person." People doing the survey are asked to rate how often this happens to them. Anyone having an out-of-experience would answer "Once" or "Sometimes" to such a question, causing them to get a non-zero score on such a scale. But this does nothing whatsoever to show any pathology of such people. It merely shows that people who have out-of-body experiences report out-of-body experiences. Trying to claim a non-zero score on such a survey is evidence of pathology is like creating a Liberal Pathology Syndrome questionnaire in which one of the questions asks "Do you sometimes worry about the suffering of homeless people," and then claiming that scores above zero on such a survey are evidence of mental pathology in liberals. That would be an extremely absurd methodology. All that such a survey would be showing is that people who care about the suffering of homeless people are people who care about the suffering of homeless people. 

The same  Dissociative Experiences Scale asks another question that will get a "Once" answer from very many people who have had near-death experiences.  The question is "Some people have the experience of sometimes remembering a past event so vividly that they feel as if they were reliving that event." People having near-death experiences often report having a "life review" in which they briefly re-experience key moments of their lives, in some very sped-up manner.  Anyone having such an experience might answer "Once" to such a survey item, even though they have no actual pathology. 

In the press release of the "Are out-of-body experiences indicative of an underlying psychopathology?" paper we get some laughable nonsense about childhood trauma being an explanation for out-of-body experiences.  It reminds me of similar rubbish that Sigmund Freud and his followers advanced for decades.  Freud and the Freudians would again and again claim that some mental anomaly cropping up long after childhood was caused by childhood traumas such as the repression of a male patient's sexual lust for his mother. Freudianism is now regarded as a huge error and dead end by most psychologists. The idea that someone would have an experience of floating out of his body and viewing it from above because of some childhood trauma many years ago is an attempted explanation about as silly and stupid as you could make. 

There is actually much evidence that near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences produce a beneficial effect on the minds of those who have them.  I could provide endless examples of people who had such experiences and who claimed that their worldview had been deepened, and that they now regarded their existence as more meaningful than they previously realized. 

The 2023 study "Incidence of near-death experiences in patients surviving a prolonged critical illness and their long-term impact: a prospective observational study" found that 19 out of 126 survivors of Intensive Care Unit hospitalization (15%) had a near-death experience. There was only a very low association between such experiences and positive responses on a Dissociative Experiences Scale questionnaire discussed above, with an odds ratio of only 1.13. The low association seems to argue against hallucinatory explanations for near-death experiences.  Also, when we factor in that such a questionnaire is one that unfairly has two questions that might cause people having a near-death experience or out-of-body experience to score above 0 on such a scale, as mentioned above, we should suspect that the reported very low association is more like a zero association. 

The Dissociative Experiences Scale has been criticized as an invalid survey asking questions about too many types of different experiences. A paper says, "Dissociative Disorders (DD) are perhaps the most controversial psychiatric diagnoses." The same paper tells us that half of the theorists of so-called dissociative disorders think that dissociative disorders are a "socio-cultural construct" and that people report having them mostly because of a kind of social contagion in which they have been encouraged to believe they have such a disorder. 

Another type of psychiatrist survey promoting gaslighting, psychiatric mudslinging and weaponized psychology against healthy subjects is something called the Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule or DDIS.  Described here, it is a questionnaire that asks many questions. One of the questions (Question 64) asks whether you have experienced "having thoughts taken out of your mind." Another asks if you have ever experienced "thinking thoughts which seemed to be someone else's."  Anyone having the extremely common and healthy human experience of ESP or telepathy might answer "yes" to such questions; but that would cause them to have a higher pathology rank on this poorly designed survey.  The same survey asks as its Question 94, "Do you ever have memories come back to you all of a sudden, in a flood or like flashbacks?" The question would cause anyone reporting the common life review of near-death experiences to rate a higher score on this supposed test for "dissociation."  Then there are Questions 100 to 107, which will cause anyone having any of many different paranormal experiences to score high on this supposed test of dissociation.  The questionnaire is a blatant example of specialists trying to engage in gaslighting, psychiatric mudslinging and weaponized psychology; and it is also a blatant example of when medicine goes astray because people are trying to wage ideological warfare against observational reports that offend them. 

We should not have any trust in any claims of "higher dissociative disorder" obtained by the use of techniques such as this appalling "pathologize the spooky" junk medicine "Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule" (DDIS) or the not-as-bad but also very faulty "Dissociative Experiences Scale." 

We may reasonably wonder whether something like this ever went on in someone's mind:

Materialist Jim: I'm so sick of hearing about all those apparitions sightings, out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences! Many people say they disprove my cherished belief that I am just a brain, not a soul.

But wait a second.  I think there's a way to fight such accounts! The key is make it look like the people reporting such things are crazy. 

I can just create some "Official Survey" I can say is a questionnaire designed to detect signs of mental illness.  Some of the questions will ask people if they ever experienced things just like what is reported in apparition sightings, near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences. Any "yes" answer will create a score above zero, providing what we can call evidence of mental illness. 

The current reigning "manual of psychiatry"  (the DSM-5) has only one sentence referring to out-of-body experiences, a mere passing reference. The authors of the manual show zero signs of having studied this complex phenomenon, and do nothing to substantiate any claim that it is associated with mental illness. A paper on the DSM-5 manual states this:

"The DSM-5 perpetuates some of the problems of previous editions and creates some new ones. The new definition of mental disorder is tautological, encourages reification and circular reasoning, and creates nine new distinct pathways whereby a client can be diagnosed with a mental illness, absent any scientific breakthroughs that would justify this new definition. Conditions with clearly established organic etiologies continue to be labeled as mental disorders... Fundamental errors in logical reasoning appear to form the manual’s conceptual foundation. The DSM-5 unjustifiably expands to scope of practice of psychiatry by pathologizing normative reactions to environmental stresses and one’s personal learning history. Heterogeneously presenting conditions are collapsed into singular categories of mental disorder, which confuses the assessment and diagnostic process, and deflects attention away from demonstrable person-in-environment variables to hypothetical inner causes. One consequence of these problems is an unwarranted focus on treating mental disorders via medications and other somatic therapies said to impact the client’s mind, as opposed to improving the client’s ability to effectively y engage the environment reducing the level of stressful and aversive encounters....With time, we may look back on the current mania for psychotropic treatment, aided and abetted by the DSM-5, with the same sense of incredulity and horror that we now read about ovariectomies, nasal cauterizations, teeth extractions, and lobotomies [previous bungling psychiatric treatment techniques]."

Very many have complained that the diagnostic categories in the DSM-5 are largely arbitrary and dubious social constructs of some small committee, and that many of the claimed syndromes have no clear and distinct observational basis or known biological cause. 

All of the people who engaged in the type of gaslighting and psychiatric mudslinging described above should be ashamed of abusing their positions to engage in this type of groundless character assassination.  They have done nothing to show pathology in those having near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences or other common types of paranormal experiences, but may have done something to demonstrate a little pathology in their own minds or ethics. 

Page 138 of the 2025 research document here gives us an idea of how unfounded are attempts to associate reports of the paranormal with mental pathology:

" At that time, 1500 people from a representative sample were interviewed by telephone about the conceivability of paranormal phenomena and about personal paranormal experiences. The openness to paranormal phenomena was high, and more than 50% of the Germans had already had a paranormal experience in their lives (e.g., ESP-dream, coincidence, apparition of the dead, or observation of an UFO). Statistically at least, we were able to establish that the paranormal is quite normal and our findings are in line with comparable results from other country studies in Europe and the USA; e.g. Castro, Burrows & Wooffitt, 2014; Greeley, 1975. In addition, there was a rather relaxed approach to the extraordinary experiences, which were often reported anecdotally and described as life-enriching. Very rarely were these experiences associated with 'existential shock' or the need for therapeutic counselling."