Cryonics and mental illness...
Doug Skrecky, a frequent poster to Cryonet, a mailing list devoted to cryonics, made the following observation after one of the frequent bouts of sniping between members of rival cryonics organizations.
"...after seeing and evaluating the behaviour of a number of people involved in
cryonics, I've reluctantly concluded that a number are mentally ill.
A possibly relevant study was done on creativity and psychopathology in
291 world-famous men (British Journal of Psychiatry 165: 22-34
1994). Guess which profession was associated with the highest incidence of
psychopathology? No, it wasn't politicians, of which 17.8% suffered from
severe illness, including Hitler, Woodrow Wilson and Lincoln. The group
that scored the worst was writers. one is reminded of the saying: genius
is next to insanity. The breakdown for writers was as follows:
Unfortunately, my own observations tend to support Skreky's contention. (Present company excepted, of course...:>)
"...after seeing and evaluating the behaviour of a number of people involved in
cryonics, I've reluctantly concluded that a number are mentally ill.
A possibly relevant study was done on creativity and psychopathology in
291 world-famous men (British Journal of Psychiatry 165: 22-34
1994). Guess which profession was associated with the highest incidence of
psychopathology? No, it wasn't politicians, of which 17.8% suffered from
severe illness, including Hitler, Woodrow Wilson and Lincoln. The group
that scored the worst was writers. one is reminded of the saying: genius
is next to insanity. The breakdown for writers was as follows:
Degree of Psychopathology None Mild Marked Severe 2% 10% 42% 46% _____________________________________ Maupassant Chekov Balzac Conrad France Bennett Dostoevsky Hauptmann Brecht Faulkner Melville Camus Gide Orwell Dickens Gogol Dumas(pere) Hemingway Flaubert Hesse Galsworthy Ibsen Gorky Joyce Hardy Kafka Hugo Kipling Huxley (A) Lawrence James (H) Mann (T) Maugham (S) Manzoni Pasternak Proust Pirandello Sartre Shaw Scott Fitzgerald Thackeray Stendhal Trollope Strindberg Turgenev Tolstoy Zola Waugh (E) Wells Wilde
Unfortunately, my own observations tend to support Skreky's contention. (Present company excepted, of course...:>)