Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Ghostwatch

Episode Date: October 28, 2016

A lot of folks like scary movies around Halloween time, but what happens when "spooked out" becomes "legitimate medical condition"? This week, Dr. Sydnee and Justin tell the story of a movie that migh...t have gone too far. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. I'm sitting in the back of the mountain. Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones,
Starting point is 00:01:06 the way I'll tour Miss Guy did medicine. I'm Mirko who's just a macaroon. And I'm Sydney Macaroon. I wouldn't change places with anyone tonight. OK, I see what you're doing. With a cobbump can face cells and watch the witches flight. Just skip ahead to the tambourine part. Anything can happen on Halloween. It doesn't get up and on Halloween.
Starting point is 00:01:26 It darkens it into a... Okay. Alright, so welcome to Justin Singh's The Hits. I'll sing this whole song. Your Halloween hits, fun catch. Don't ever see the mod of tambourine. There we go. That's all you're waiting for.
Starting point is 00:01:43 My starting point. How great is Tim Curry? You're beginning the beginning. How great is Tim Curry? That track is the best. They're like no good Halloween songs, just that one. And Monster Mesh. And everything from Mickey's Monster musical. Everything from Mickey's Monster musical, sure.
Starting point is 00:01:59 Yeah. And we're all part of it's fun. That's the only Halloween songs that I like Happy Halloween Happy Halloween Sydney. I don't know why we went into that the the MPR bit from SNL It's a delightful time. Halloween is here. The holiday season of Halloween spooky the spooky time of the years upon us I'm here.. Everybody's excited, costumes, crafts. People would say this show is already
Starting point is 00:02:29 usually pretty scary. Usually, solbons. That's true. I think we were even listed as a horror podcast. Yeah, at one publication. Yeah, I don't think that's completely fair, but then I have a, I don't know, a work perspective on this, I think.
Starting point is 00:02:46 Yeah. But I felt like in the spirit of the Halloween season, we should do something a little bit spooky, a little bit scary. I love it. A ghost story, as it were. Yeah. Sort of. I'm ready to go.
Starting point is 00:03:00 It involves ghosts. I got my Chile Mocha. I will say the word ghost. Okay. That's actually a trademark of my brother, my brother, my brother, me, but I think I can talk to them and just sort of get a temporary license to talk about ghosts. Oh, yeah, you guys do a ghost thing, right?
Starting point is 00:03:14 Yeah, just love the ghost. Just do a ghost thing. You do a ghost thing. Is there with your horse thing and your shark thing? Yeah. Okay, cool. Now, I want to talk about cinematic neuroses. I know that doesn't sound like a ghost thing, but it will get there. I heard cinematic. I'm into that.
Starting point is 00:03:32 Right. That has to do with movies. Okay. So most of the time when we talk about severe psychological reactions, like like somebody having, mainly what I'm referencing is post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. We're causing about, we're talking about real life events causing them, right? So somebody goes through some sort of, the experience or witness or confronted with an event that involves a threat of death, a threat of serious injury, actual death or serious injury,
Starting point is 00:04:05 and a threat to their own personal self integrity. And this causes a severe fear reaction, they feel helplessness, they feel horror, and then you get all the symptoms that result from that. And so when we talk about that in medical terms, we're usually referencing, especially historically, throughout different case reports and articles and how we define this disorder. We're talking about real life events.
Starting point is 00:04:33 But since the age of media, we have begun to accept the fact that maybe those kinds of symptoms could be caused by things we see but are not actually experiencing so to speak. Well, it makes perfect sense, right? Like the whole reason that we can engage with drama or comedy is that our brains don't necessarily parse reality versus something that we see on a movie screen in completely different ways. It's still the same inputs and the same. And but the question is, is that then could that go too far? I don't know, Sydney. Could it?
Starting point is 00:05:14 I guess it could. I'm going to tell you about it. So when we're talking about cinematic neuroses, which is not really a term, neuroses that we use anymore, this actually probably dates back to like a Freudian concept. When we talk about, I don't think Freud coined that term, but when he talked about neuroses and then in relation to cinema, what we're referencing is this Freudian concept that you have this struggle with the devil, with a love hate relationship with the devil, which I'm not entirely certain how that works. But
Starting point is 00:05:52 you have control over that. And if you feel that you are losing control over that, that you are helpless to it, then it makes you, it, it connects to relationships in your personal life that you no longer have control over and now it will make you feel helpless and alone and seeing things that relate to the devil that have to do with losing control can trigger this. So if your relationship is an energy if your relationship with the devil gets out of control, it can have an impact on your other relationships. Yes.
Starting point is 00:06:28 And you feel out of control of other relationships, especially if you're already in some sort of stressful relationship situation. So this is the basis of a lot of these cases that I'm going to talk about. Now a lot of this, too, tends to be more likely and ins susceptible individuals. So people who, like I said, are already under some degree of stress, but not necessarily. Some of these cases I'm gonna talk about are in people who previously reported no psychological symptoms
Starting point is 00:06:55 or problems, okay. But basically the idea is that you see something in a film or a television show, or here something on the radio, and it makes you feel like you have lost control over events, and that you yourself, your own person as an entity, is now kind of up to the whims of whatever. I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that
Starting point is 00:07:18 from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from , I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from , I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from, from, I get that from, I get that from, I get that from all movies can cause some disturbances in this as you referenced Justin like there like you don't have to see something that severely impacts you to
Starting point is 00:07:29 feed. I mean obviously like movies make us cry. Right. movies make us laugh. So they can affect the way that we think and feel and maybe like change the way that you look at something. But what we're and they can even cause like symptoms that are negative. So you can see a movie and have trouble sleeping or have like recurrent thoughts of that. I know that for me there are certain movies that after I watched, I referenced a lot
Starting point is 00:07:52 the exorcism of Emily Rose, where afterwards, it stuck with me and it was kind of like in my head, the images for a while. I have that with the descent. Yeah, but that's, it's less severe than what we're talking about here. Okay. Okay. So let's start with kind of the precursor to this. And that would probably be war of the world. Right. I've heard this story. He, uh, HG Wells did a broadcast war of the world and
Starting point is 00:08:18 what? Orson Wells did the broadcast. Oh, yeah. A.C. Wells, sure. There are too many wells. And a lot of people thought it would be thought it was real and they got super freaked out by it. Now that is the story As it is told right that it caused this panic so on it was on October 30th 1938 Orson Wells Produced the peace and there were actors involved and it and it about an alien invasion. If you're not familiar, where the world's was about an alien invasion of Earth. And the way that he produced it, it was like a series of news bulletins that broke into other radio programming.
Starting point is 00:08:56 And it detailed an alien invasion of a town, Grover's Mills in New Jersey. Now, the problem, and what caused the panic that Justin was referencing was that many listeners were actually listening to a different radio program at first that was way more popular. And so they didn't tune in immediately to hear the beginning that said this is a dramatic piece that will be presented of HD Wells War of the Worlds, blah blah blah, they didn't catch all that. So they just tuned in to hear news bulletins that sounded like aliens were invading. The other thing is that a lot of people didn't necessarily catch that it was aliens who were
Starting point is 00:09:33 invading. Oh, okay. They tuned into a news program that talked about invaders, and this is in 1938. Oh, sure right. So this is at a time when a lot of people thought this may be referencing a German invaders. This may be at the German Army. So police actually were in the studio by the time they were hoarding ended. Wow.
Starting point is 00:09:57 There were many, many calls that came in afterwards. But when we think of this, a lot of people have this concept of this event that there was like panic in the streets, people screaming and running out of their homes, you know, that's actually greatly exaggerated. It actually doesn't surprise me that much, especially with with Orson Wells being involved, because he had a reputation as quite a a showman who like to play with with every reality and truth or fiction. I mean, he made a whole documentary about it called F.S. for Fake, which plays with that exact idea.
Starting point is 00:10:30 Exactly. And that's, I think, I think a lot of the he even, I think, reference like leaving the studio and seeing the streets flooded with people and all this stuff. And honestly, that really wasn't true because the program that ran at the same time was so much more popular than this radio programming. Most people never heard this. Most people were confused for a minute and then figured it out and were more upset by it because at the end he said this has been a presentation. If you tuned into the very end you heard again that this was not real. So most people were more upset by it and annoyed because they felt like they were trying to
Starting point is 00:11:09 be tricked. There were some people who wrote in and said, like, you scared me, you upset my family. You know, this was not right. You should have greater standards. It was used to trigger a backlash against radio and immoral programming on radio and things that could disturb children and scare people, but it really didn't do that. But this was the first time where we see this idea that maybe you could hear something and it could affect people enough to change their behavior, create some sort of panic
Starting point is 00:11:41 or mass hysteria, so to speak. The first case of this actually being documented is probably 1974 in response to the exorcist. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. So after the movie, the exorcist came out, in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, there were four case reports published of people who reported previously not being diagnosed or treated for any sort of psychological illnesses who developed what they called in the journal and acute traumatic neuroses from watching the exorcist. So they actually came in to hospitals, went to see doctors and said, I can't sleep. I'm terrified constantly One man said he was convinced his daughter was possessed and he couldn't be around her anymore because he was so convinced that she was possessed by the devil
Starting point is 00:12:35 There were people who had diluted obviously that's a delusion He the people believed things that were not true some people even experienced psychotic symptoms, you know hallucinations I just don't, I don't, there had to be other stuff going on though. I just don't give credence to the fact that you watch the exercise once and you suddenly just like, you go from 100% solid ground to hallucinations
Starting point is 00:13:00 and what have you. Like I've seen the exercise, it's pretty good. It's all right. I think the descent is scarier, but like've seen the actress. It's pretty good. That's all right. I think the descent is scarier, but like fun. You know, this is pretty scary. I have a hard time believing that, but again, like, I guess you have to remind yourself with cinema. I'm gonna add I guess any new medium,
Starting point is 00:13:16 but cinema is the one that, I think is the most recent press reference. Like, we don't, our brains, a lot of time have to evolve with the medium. Like, you hear stories, our brains a lot of time have to evolve with the medium. Like, you hear stories of like them showing the footage of the train coming into the station and people like jumping out of the way in the theater. Exactly. You had that with virtual reality now too, actually.
Starting point is 00:13:36 People whose our brains just aren't equipped right now to process it. And we have to expect that we'll get better about that. But it's funny because I think that you see that a lot just anecdotally when you, for me, the exorcist is a terrifying movie. And the first time I saw it, it horrified me, it deeply disturbed me. It took me a long time to be able to sleep with the light off at night after seeing the exorcist. Today, if I watched it for the first time,
Starting point is 00:14:05 I'd can't guarantee it would have that same effect over me, but that's because a lot of movies have done that and more since then. So you're right, it is something that we adapt to. And I think that's why when we talk about movies and TV shows kind of upping the ante, they have to take it further. This is why, because we become accustomed to it.
Starting point is 00:14:24 But people weren't accustomed to it when they saw the exercise. They found it very upsetting. There were a lot of reports from ERs like, we had people come in who were very upset. But this was documented in a medical journal that there were at least four cases of people who were diagnosed with psychiatric problems after seeing the exercise. Now you're right. They actually draw on in these articles, they draw on the Freudian concept of, we think these individuals were already in stressful life situations, and that maybe this was kind of a last straw
Starting point is 00:14:53 kind of thing. They saw the exercise, and that was just enough to push them over the proverbial edge. So sure, that's possible. But, maybe you don't necessarily have to be already kind of in a stressful life situation. Maybe something could be scary enough that if you're younger, it would deeply disturb you. If you're just not old enough to comprehend it.
Starting point is 00:15:17 Like what? Let's talk about ghost watch. Okay. Now, being from the United States, IA was not familiar with Ghostwatch. Have you ever heard of this program? No, no, no. Okay. I imagine that some of our listeners who are from the UK may have already know
Starting point is 00:15:32 this story may have heard of this before. So on Halloween in 1992, BBC One, which is like the serious one, they're like, they do the news. This is important to the story. BBC One took this concept of something that might, you know, terrify people. They took it a little further.
Starting point is 00:15:53 There was a horror mockumentary that was written by Stephen Volk. And his original idea was that he wanted to do like the six-part series leading up to Halloween, where he would do all these kinds of stories and it would all culminate in a live broadcast from a haunted house on Halloween and it would you know be very popular. That all after he pitched that they were like well we don't think that's a great idea we'll let you do one show and you can say it's live but it's not going to be
Starting point is 00:16:21 live. You can record it ahead of time but you can we'll put it out on Halloween as like this big special program. They did it at like 9.25, so it was just late enough. I guess it's after what they call the watershed hour. So it's late enough to be like night time programming. Don't we have a term for that when you can start cursing on TV? Safe Harbor. Yeah. Is that for us, it's after 10, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. So this was 925 so I guess maybe 9 is when the cutoff is so it was it was past the kids are watching TV but still early enough that probably some kids are going to watch it. It's a Halloween special.
Starting point is 00:16:57 It was aired as part of Screen One which is a drama series so it was aired as part of what is clearly a fictional series of programming. It was directed by Leslie Manning, and the plot of it was that there were some BBC actual reporters, people who actually were reporters on BBC One, so that people watching at home would recognize them and already know them, who were going to go to what was being called the most haunted house in Britain in London. And they were going to report on the haunted activities in this house. The reporters involved Sarah Green and Craig Charles were two who were going to the house to investigate and then back at the studio where Mike Smith and Michael Parkinson and they
Starting point is 00:17:43 were going to be tossing back and forth and doing news reports from there, interviewing the children and the mother involved, interviewing neighbors, and then getting calls in the studio about the house to get background on it. These were all well-known public figures, and Greene actually appeared on children's programming on the BBC.
Starting point is 00:18:03 So there were some parents who may have been more inclined to let their children watch because, oh, we know her. She does kids show. So anyway, it all was kind of framed as, here are people you know reporting on events that are happening. And they advertised the live broadcast somewhat ahead of time, even though it was actually, it wasn't live. They recorded it in a couple weeks before it happened. So, so what happened? Well, Justin, I'm going to tell you what happened next, right after we go to the billing department. Let's go.
Starting point is 00:18:35 The medicines, the medicines that ask you let my God before the mouth. Listen up Midwestern Max Funsters. Do not miss out on the inaugural Chicago Podcast Festival. Listen up Midwestern Max Funsters. Do not miss out on the inaugural Chicago Podcast Festival, November 17th through 19th. Catch the hilarious ladies of Lady to Lady, and the witty and incisive Ennecke and James from Minority Corner. Plus, Bullseye with Jessie Thorn will feature interviews with some pretty heavy hitters, like Andre Royo and Dwayne Kennedy.
Starting point is 00:19:05 Don't snooze, don't lose, tickets are available right now. Visit maximumfund.org and buy them. So you were saying that they had been advertising it, leading up to it, they were kind of pretending maybe sort of like it was live broadcast, but it had been pre-taped. Exactly. So what happened? So as viewers tuned in on Halloween, 925 on Halloween,
Starting point is 00:19:27 1992, what they saw were green and Charles at the house of the early family, Pam and her daughter Suzanne and Kim, who had been reporting strange noises going on in their house. Initially, the daughters heard these strange noises and asked their mom, what is that sound? What isn't? She said, oh, it's probably just the pipes. Now as a result of this, the ghost became named pipes, which is a really scary name for it. This is a scary name.
Starting point is 00:19:55 On a side note. They interviewed the family. They interviewed neighbors, and they also had a fake expert along with them, Dr. Lynn Pasco, who is actually played by Jillian Bevin. And then as I said in the studio, they had Smith and Parkinson taking calls from viewers and the calls from the viewers were important too because all of this is scripted. You're right. And as you are seeing the disturbances that are happening in the house, you're getting background seeing the disturbances that are happening in the house, you're getting background information from callers who are saying, I know who lived there before. Have you heard the story of what happened
Starting point is 00:20:31 to them? And that kind of, so you're building the ghost story that way. So the ghost name pipes we learn is, is this entity that is ancient. It is like this malevolent spirit that has been around for a very long time, and it's very angry, and it's very scary. Now it has taken many forms, and through the through the collars and the neighbors, we hear about people who have lived in the house before. Most recently, there was a Raymond Tundstle, who may have been a child predator, someone scary already, who was already disturbed and then was possessed by the ghost pipes or the spirit, the entity, and had hung himself under the stairs.
Starting point is 00:21:14 There was an area under the stairs and then had not been found and had maybe been eaten by cats. So we get this horrifying story. They talk about the spirit that inhabited him was probably this older spirit that they called Mother Sedans, who was a baby farmer from the 19th century. Do you know what that is? No. We heard of baby farming. Yeah. I had to look this up. So baby farming was a horrible practice. It was supposed to be... Babies and little tiny overalls. But just getting, they can only do like shallots and turnips because they're so little, right? That's, tell you what, if you don't want to hear about
Starting point is 00:21:54 what baby farming is, that's what it is and just skip ahead about 30 seconds or a minute or so. If you really want to hear what it is, baby farming- How do I skip heads in? It was supposed to be what would become like later the idea of fostering or adoption, but that's not what it was back in the 19th century. Women who for whatever reason would have a child and then couldn't raise it or didn't want to or it wasn't proper, maybe it was out of wedlock, whatever reason they didn't
Starting point is 00:22:23 want the child would give it to someone else who was a baby farmer, who would care for the child for a lump sum of money. And you could either do that for a while and then give them back to the parents, maybe when they're older, easier to take care of, or you would keep them forever, or you would give them to someone else who wanted a child, whatever. Basic ideas, they were responsible for the baby. And like I said, this should have been a precursor to fostering an adoption, and certainly, in some cases, it became that.
Starting point is 00:22:52 But many of these people who were baby farmers were poor, and would get this big lump sum of money to take care of the child indefinitely. Well, it was better if the child did it live there. Yeah, okay, I'm with you. So, most famously, there was the murderer, Amelia Dyer, who was responsible for the deaths of many, many, many, many children, and there were also other evil people who took advantage of this practice. So that's a really scary ghost, is what I'm saying.
Starting point is 00:23:21 That's a very scary ghost. That's a very scary ghost. Whoever the ghost is, throughout the broadcast, we see more and more evidence. We hear noises at first, and then we start to see like apparitions of the ghost. Throughout, we get more gruesome details of the history. The presence of the ghost is becoming more obvious,
Starting point is 00:23:41 and the newscasters are becoming scared. Everybody's getting upset. Like what started off as this like fun Halloween, like, oh, we'll go to a haunted house. Broadcast is becoming something very intense and terrifying. At this point, the doctor and the reporters realize that the entity, the ghost is becoming stronger and they're seeing the ghost and they're seeing more of its activity,
Starting point is 00:24:08 probably because of the television audience viewing at home. They say that it's sort of like a national say-ons, as they are all watching and believing in and participating in these events, they are making the ghost stronger. Weird. and that now Maybe they can't stop it. It's too late. They've channeled this energy of the as as an entire nation It they've channeled their energy into this ghost and the ghost has become too powerful and as the show culminates
Starting point is 00:24:38 The ghost actually drags the reporter Sarah Green under the stairs into that area where the person had died Presumably she is now killed. We do not see her again. And then it escapes through the cameras into the BBC studio, where it takes control of the studio and possesses the host Parkinson. And it ends with a shot of him being possessed by pipes, the ghost. And then presumably the ghost escaping out to wreak havoc throughout. So what was the reaction like to this?
Starting point is 00:25:12 Okay, so the reaction was not great. There were lots of complaints. A lot of people were very upset because really there was the, there was the, when they aired it, there was the credits ahead of time. And it was clearly part of this drama series, but there really was no other indication throughout that it was fake because they wanted it to be scary. And that was their defense.
Starting point is 00:25:34 We wanted it to be scary. We didn't want to tell people it was fake. So we didn't tell people it was fake at the end. The studio was flooded with calls. The BBC received tons of criticism. All of the tabloids the next day were published saying, BBC horrifies the nation, terrifies everyone, everyone's scared, everybody, there's a general uproar,
Starting point is 00:25:53 to try to dampen that green appeared on a children's show the following Monday to say, hey, look, I'm still alive, it's fine, I did Dory kids, I didn't die, that was all fake. But the damage was already done. There were so many complaints to the BBC that they had to apologize, they had to apologize for it, and they put a 10 year ban on the program.
Starting point is 00:26:15 Now, why are we talking about this in a medical sense? Well, after the show, there were 35 complaints to the Broadcasting Standards Commission that not only was this inappropriate and scary and we don't like that our kids saw this, but it had severe psychological effects on members of their family. That this was more than just a scary show. Your show damaged me, my husband, my mom, my child, whatever, mostly children. There was one case that caught national attention
Starting point is 00:26:47 and got some headlines where a family blamed the suicide of their 18 year old son on the program. Oh my gosh. He killed himself five days after the show aired. And while they couldn't directly link it to the show, the parents felt strongly that maybe that was what had pushed them over the edge.
Starting point is 00:27:06 And so there was a headline that ran, Ghost Watch killed my son. You know, so this, of course, got a lot of attention from the Broadcasting Standards Commission, along with all of these other complaints, basically they answered this with the tinier band and the apology. No other real action was taken because you couldn't prove that. Well, it's a hard, it's a really tricky legal precedent to draw, right? Like that you're, and I don't know anything about, about UK law. I don't really know anything about American law there.
Starting point is 00:27:37 I said it. But like, it seems like a really sticky wicket to say like, your show made me mentally ill. You know what I mean? Like cause mental illness with me. Like that seems like a really dangerous precedent. Exactly. Well, and that's what they said. They could not prove, I mean, there was no way to find out was it the show that caused the problem and canna show the other bigger issues canna show do that. Which like I've referenced, we have, were the world who upset some people and we have the exorcist where there were some scattered case reports, but we don't really have an established at this point, like in the medical
Starting point is 00:28:15 sense, we don't have an established precedent for like, what is cinematic neuroses, how intense can it, can you get PTSD from watching a movie from watching TV? Can you really? Yeah, I you know can't can it be severe enough that you become suicidal? I mean this is still all up in the air at this point I think today even we wouldn't know 100% if we can answer that question What did follow this though after these kind of like news reports and anecdotal cases in 1994 the British Medical Journal, so we're talking big time, real deal journal,
Starting point is 00:28:49 the British Medical Journal published two case reports about diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder in two 10-year-old boys as a result of watching Ghost Watch. They said that they had 12-month history of sleep difficulties. Nightmares, fear of the dark and couldn't sleep alone, fear of ghosts and truth of thoughts, panic attacks, that it had all on set suddenly while they were watching and immediately after they watched Ghost Watch.
Starting point is 00:29:19 They couldn't go upstairs because it reminded them of the house and the program. They had had to stay over at their aunts house because it reminded them less. And neither of them had any symptoms before and now they do after. I have a hard time believing the, like I said, that a single event like that could bring on mental illness. But I do see how, I think, if they had any anxiety
Starting point is 00:29:47 leading up to that, like that can be, for people who live with anxiety, like that can be triggers like that are a big deal because you can be keeping the ship afloat for a while and like something like that can be the triggering factor that so it brings it down on you. Which I actually think is what, you know, they're in response to this,
Starting point is 00:30:09 a lot of letters were written and published in the British medical journal saying, you know, there were similar cases, there were four other children that they identified, specifically in reaction to Ghost Watch who had these same symptoms between the ages of 11 and 14. And then they even mentioned a case of one eight year old boy
Starting point is 00:30:24 who was very upset after watching casualty, which is a, I guess, a British medical drama. Oh, wow. Kind of so opera medical drama. But what they said in all these cases, and then they also had some scattered reports of symptoms in the elderly as well. But what they said in these cases is that exactly
Starting point is 00:30:42 what you're alluding to, some of the children were reported as being sort of anxious, not being diagnosed with anxiety, but ahead of time their parents said, well, they've always been kind of anxious children. And that the symptoms resolved so quickly afterwards. And they did, they did require some therapy, but it was such a quick resolution and without kind of the cremity of PTSD that many people said, you know what, I think these are more like acute anxiety reactions as opposed to post-traumatic stress disorder,
Starting point is 00:31:13 which is a whole other entity. So maybe these were children who already had anxiety, and this was a trigger for them, that makes more sense. Either way, these reports are continually referenced. I think what's interesting is as I was reading about this About the British Medical Journal article. They are referenced today when we have the the bigger conversation about violence in TV and movies and video games I really an impact you hear these case reports referenced as look at what this one TV show, this one time, did to these children. How are you saying that something that they play on a daily basis? Anyway, so this is added to that conversation.
Starting point is 00:31:52 What effect does this media have, especially on kids? Just as a side note, Ghostwatch is referenced on Dr. Who. I forgot about that in the episode, Army of Ghost in 2006. And there was a linked up website that the BBC created between, there's a tie-in website between Ghostwatch and Doctor Who. What Army of Ghosts? That was, there was a show on TV that was called, oh, that was called Ghostwatch.
Starting point is 00:32:16 I said up here, so many times on TV. There was a documentary that covers all this and everything, but it's called Ghost Watch Behind the Curtain that came out in 2013, if you're interested in the history of this. And I guess, and I don't know, this is one of those things where you read, and then you have to wonder living here in West Virginia and the US, is this really true? I don't know. But they say that starting in 2010, there is something called the National Science where they encouraged fans of Ghostwatch to,
Starting point is 00:32:47 they didn't show it on TV, it's that they at 925 encouraged everyone to start their own private recording, however they have access to it, YouTube or whatever, at home, on Halloween at 925 in the evening, and just know that the entire country is watching it. Even though it's not really being broadcast. I don't know if people really do that. It sounds really cool. I kind of want to. That sounds awesome. Except the time difference. I don't even know what time it would be watching it. Yeah. I need to see it. Can you get on DVD or whatever? Probably over there. Oh, I'm sure we could find it. I'm sure we could access it. I found it on YouTube. It's a weird, distorted version to keep the
Starting point is 00:33:27 bots at bay. Because they've got scanners that look for copyrighted contents, people distorted. You know how someone knows who watched Canadian dragons then that looks weird? Yeah. That's fascinating sitting. I'm very spooky. So be careful what you watch this Halloween season. Don't just pop in Hocus Pocus. I'll Hickley Piddledy, you gotta make sure that you're in the right headspace for it. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking of. It was Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus.
Starting point is 00:33:59 Folks, that's gonna do it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks, the maximum fun network for having us as a part of their extended family. There's a lot of great podcasts there at maximumfund.org for you to enjoy. I want to say quick congratulations to beloved Sorbonne's listeners Teresa McAroy and her husband Travis on the birth of their baby girl. Congratulations. Welcome, BB.
Starting point is 00:34:32 Welcome. And thanks to the taxpayers for letting us use your song Medicines is the Intro and Outure of our program. And I believe that's going to do it for us. So until next week, my name is Justin McAroy. I'm Sydney McAroy. And as always, don't draw a hole in your head. Alright! Maximumfund.org
Starting point is 00:35:09 Comedy and Culture, Artistone. Listen or supported.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.