Why hypnosis scares the crapola out of me

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http://www.rickross.com/groups/turning.html

This page has news articles relating to how a 34 year old woman in Sydney, Australia, went nuts after attending a self-help workshop called Turning Point and eventually jumped to her death after exhibiting what doctors called regression to a childlike state. Not only that, a Korean man who attended the exact same course committed suicide as well. Both victims were naked when they died. Obviously something happened during that course, in December 2005 in Sydney, that made two people snap. That self-help program apparently includes regression hypnosis to "remove blockages" from childhood. The people simply didn't come back to their adult selves. The woman suddenly lost an inhibition against singing that she had had all her life, and was bursting into song regularly during the last few days of her life, where she had refused to sing all her life. She died singing. She exhibited childish behaviors and her voice became that of a child's. This sort of thing is why I will NEVER do hypnosis. You might not come back to reality afterward.

Don't worry. You can't hypnotize an unwilling mind....at least not without drugs or other methods to induce an altered state of consciousness.

It sounds like a really sad variety of people who already had some pretty severe mental problems, hoped for help, and unfortunately with their mental illness it was just fuel for their own imagination - in a catastrophic direction for these cases.

Australia's Channel 9 did a segment on this case on a program called 60 Minutes which is the same format as the American 60 Minutes:

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/stor ... king-point

Just watching this segment gave me the heebie jeebies. It seems as if they took her back to being a child, and left her as a child. The Korean man was dealing with being gay, and he was from a culture where homosexuality is a MAJOR taboo. In addition, a man who took a course designed by the designer of Turning Point went bonkers too. All three people died singing euphorically. Hypnotic regression in such an uncontrolled environment is a recipe for disaster. I have always had a very deep fear of hypnosis, which is probably why I'm so fascinated and appalled by this case.

What people like these need is psychotherapy, but it is not always available. In the US, insurers frequently won't pay for it. In single payer, government run health systems like Australia, psychiatry is frequently seen as "extra" and regularly gets cut. So people resort to these quack therapeutic programs, which are along the same lines as taking your autistic three year old to a DAN! "doctor".

Australia especially seems to be a hotbed of self-help, even moreso than the US, and apparently the risk of getting sued for big bucks is slim to none, and there are no regulations, so punishment for any wrongdoing is nonexistent. Australia is a very freewheeling society, and the people are very independent-it tends to rank very high on indexes of countries ranked by citizen freedom. With such a society comes the idea that you can solve your own problems with a little push.

The segments of American society that are big into self-help tend to be very liberal, which in America denotes someone who is very creative and open. Many American self-help quacks go to Australia to operate, where they find willing subjects and a government that doesn't get involved. At least America has the civil courts and the threat of bankruptcy from lawsuits to stop this sort of thing. Other countries don't.