Fear and the Flu:
MEERLOO, JOOST A. M.
FEAR AND THE FLU While I was lecturing abroad last summer on the influence of fear on physical disease, and the role of mental infection in physical infection, panicky feelings developed at home...
...Even if they do not have the flu, their panicky actions make the pandemic grow...
...The laws of increase in the pathogenicity of germs are not too well known...
...Joost A. M. Meerloo, a native of Holland, is an associate in psychiatry at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research...
...FEAR AND THE FLU While I was lecturing abroad last summer on the influence of fear on physical disease, and the role of mental infection in physical infection, panicky feelings developed at home about a "global epidemic" of the Asian flu...
...Yet, it has been found that many germs become more virulent in those individuals with less resistance and natural defenses...
...Such people often prefer the certainty of being ill to the anxious anticipation of becoming ill...
...There is no reason whatever for fear and panic...
...Antibiotics, however, should not be given too early, because they do not affect the flu virus itself...
...Can it be that the latent fears in the world about the Dr...
...Some people already think that radiation and the atomic bomb have something to do with the pandemic...
...One can cite many examples to show how mental and physical defense mechanisms in our organism are constantly influenced by our fearful anticipations...
...global threat of war and atomic attack have weakened mankind's resistance to a usually benign virus...
...Nowadays, we can readily check— medically—the various complications of an individual flu case...
...During the flu pandemic, symptoms of collective fear are easily discernible...
...Statistics have proved that some virus infections like the common cold occur more often on "blue Monday...
...This cannot be explained otherwise than as an emotional phenomenon...
...a rather benign flu virus makes its appearance nearly every year...
...All this is not to say that people with real flu should not seek the advice of their physicians...
...The pandemic assumes for some people all the aspects of a magic punishment...
...Health authorities in Asia were very casual about the so-called Asian flu...
...There are also individuals who imagine they have an illness when only the possibility of an epidemic is mentioned...
...Yet, the question of epidemics and pandemics is not so simple...
...Fear and worry can increase the relative virulence of a virus...
...Modern mass communications media can unsettle sensitive minds and prepare them for passive surrender to their fears...
...True, there was a slight epidemic, but in the East they have more difficult health problems to cope with, such as cholera, dysentery and venereal disease...
...For one of the first symptoms of fear and worry about epidemics is the lowering of man's natural resistance to disease...
...Fear does not show its effects immediately, but it has a gradual nagging and breaking-down action...
...In many cases, flu vaccine can help to prevent the disease, though it is not effective for all the virus strains and works for only a short time...
...They act only against pulmonary and other complications...
...Health authorities must look beyond the virus as a cause, must seek more than an adequate anti-flu vaccine as a cure...
...When an epidemic becomes a pandemic, fearful anticipation of the disease may lower the resistance of individuals and groups even more...
...Others demand, as if their lives depended on it, that their physicians give them flu vaccine...
...But the emotional factor of over-anxious anticipation may well make the symptoms more pronounced and more dangerous than they would otherwise be...
...Since the world is so full of mysterious fears caused by the cold war and atomic blackmail, people surrender more easily to the idea of being taken ill and even of being punished by God for their evil thoughts and deeds...
...When I tried to discuss the subject of mental contagion in epidemics, my Asian colleagues became rather defensive: Flu was caused by a virus, and that was that...
...This year, there were more flu cases than usual, but most of the people got well without complications...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 6
