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The American Culture War: Coming soon to a politics near you

Aaron Rabinowitz
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The American Culture War: Coming soon to a politics near you

While writing a previous column, I was informed that ‘culture war’ is perhaps not as widespread a term as I had thought. I was surprised, since the term is ubiquitous on this side of the pond and there is no end of culture war discussion in American political media. Yet it appears the term is only just now oozing into non-American zeitgeists, as various media interests seek to globalise current hot button American culture war issues like trans rights and “woke” critiques of historic figures. Many of you may have avoided these discussions, assuming they’re another toxic American export, akin to cultural high fructose corn syrup. I can’t blame you; we’re not sending our best. Sadly, as skeptics, the culture war is something we can’t ignore. As I discussed in my first article, skepticism is fundamentally tied to social justice, which makes us combatants in the culture war whether we like it or not.

Battle reports from the culture war are often deeply contradictory, and not always for purely partisan reasons. Some have declared that the culture war is over and conservatives lost, while others declare it will rage out of control forever. Some consider the culture war a crucial battlefront for social change, while others argue it’s a distraction that sidelines genuine change. Some argue that culture wars are a universal phenomenon, while others see it as a distinctly American pastime. Some argue that the current culture war is fundamentally distinct from prior incarnations, while others argue it’s an understandable evolution of the same debates about justice going back hundreds or thousands of years.

Debates over these narratives are themselves a part of the meta level of the culture war, the level at which individuals try to shape how we understand the discourse itself. These meta level debates about narratives seem to be increasing in our very online internet world. I’m going to explain how I understand the culture war, and though my explanation is undoubtedly tied up with my own narratives that I inherited from my progressive leftist upbringing, I hope it will shed some light on this complex phenomenon for those not raised within it.

I believe the culture war is ongoing, that it is unlikely to end any time soon, and that it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. While it can be used as a distraction, I believe the culture war is a crucial front for social change, because it is fundamentally a conflict between competing ways of understanding the world, and the implications go far beyond the toppling of a few statues. While culture wars exist across the world, I worry that America remains in the grip of a particularly virulent conflict, one that stretches back through much of American history. To motivate this view, let me provide a much-abridged history of America’s culture war.

Social Justice vs Traditional Values

Out of the many attempts to define the culture war, I’m most sympathetic to Russell Johnson’s account of it as a conflict between competing worldviews, which Johnson labels “social justice” and “traditional values”. Understood this way, the culture war traces its roots at least as far back as the American Civil War, which centered on the traditional value of conserving slavery.

As a debate between progressive “social justice” values and “traditional” conservative values, the culture war transcends discrete topics like gay marriage, and so maintains prominence in a world of rapidly passing topic fads. The other advantage of this definition is that it avoids the misconception that the culture war is only about “social” issues like gay marriage, and so is separate from economic conflict. The resistance to racial equality in the US has always walked hand in hand with overwhelming fear of economic equality, exemplified in the resistance to reconstruction, the persistence of Jim Crow policies, and the anti-communist paranoia that has driven much of right wing politics in America from World War One onward. Indeed, during periods like McCarthyism, one could argue the culture war centered on economic fronts, and issues like homosexuality were involved more insofar as they were associated with communism. The key point is that “traditional values” can mean being pro-life or it can mean the freedom to be as exploitatively capitalist as the law will allow.

While the roots of the culture war go back as far as slavery and colonialism, the historical accounts of America’s culture war that I find most valuable emphasise the rapid social change of the 60’s and 70’s as the jumping-off point for the current round of open conflict. Slavery and segregation made America a powder keg of racial animus, and the greater autonomy women achieved during wartime raised serious doubts about the relegation of women to the domestic sphere. These tensions came together to produce the period of violent cultural upheaval that we now call the civil rights era.

Despite modern universal love for figures like Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights movement was not well received at the time by the white majority, even in northern states. It wasn’t until JFK’s assassination that Lyndon B. Johnson had sufficient political power to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a major piece of legislation that outlawed discrimination based on a variety of features, including race and sex. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that Johnson’s comment on signing the law was “we have lost the South for a generation”. Whether he said it or not, the comment turns out to be an understatement, as Democrats have never recovered in large swaths of the deep south, with the recent and notable exceptions of Virginia and Georgia, two states with large minority populations.

The Southern Strategy

Johnson couldn’t have imagined how much the GOP (another term for the Republican Party) would go all in on the “Southern strategy” – the explicit plan by post civil rights Republicans to hold power by focusing their energy on playing to white fear and anger over desegregation and other forms of social progress. GOP strategists believed they could control a large enough share of the white majority so that they wouldn’t need to court minority voters. As Kevin Philips, one of Nixon’s political strategists, put it (Content Note: racial slurs that are central to the point being made):

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

Despite the existence of quotes like this, and the clearly traceable shift of racist whites from Southern Democrats to the GOP, many on the right in America will still deny the Southern strategy was even a thing, or that the current demographic splits between the left and right in America are in any way the result of deliberate acts on the part of Republicans. I don’t know how anyone can hold such a position when you read this quote by another Republican strategist, Lee Atwater (Content Warning: even more racial slurs):

Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r”. By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this”, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r”. So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.

Atwater claimed that Ronald Reagan, who he advised, had no need to continue the Southern strategy. However, I would argue Reagan’s use of “welfare queens” and his aggressive war on drugs were both a straightforward continuation of the euphemism model that Atwater laid out. What’s more, Reagan’s smashing of unions continued the conservative war against anything that remotely resisted rampant capitalism.

As I mentioned, the Southern strategy wasn’t purely racial in nature. There was a corresponding backlash to the sexual revolution lead by conservative women like Phylis Schlafly that successfully resisted the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Schlafly and others like Jerry Falwell aimed to reinforce an in-group mentality amongst white Christians by fearmongering about abortions, ‘pinko’ atheists, and feminists coming to destroy the institution of family.

On every front, the GOP aligned against social justice and progress, treating it as an existential threat to “traditional American values”. During this period there were constant right wing attacks on media and academia as hotbeds of communist unrest, which provided one major contribution to our post-truth world. In essence, everything we hear about on a daily basis now is one continuous cultural conflict more than 60 years in the offing.

Identity politics

As Ezra Klein has pointed out, it was also during this period that personal identities started to stack up in a unified way that made a critique of any one part of a person’s identity a threat to every part of their identity. There are a range of theories for why this happened, and I’m most sympathetic to the ones that focus on a combination of new technology granting greater media access and America’s dreadful winner-take-all political system that was built on a bunch of terrible compromises made with slavers to preserve the union. These factors produce the two massive and unwieldy political parties we know today.

The Democrats claimed the mantle of social justice, while frequently pushing neoliberal compromises, while the Republicans continue to actively resist social justice and the use of government to improve people’s lives, for fear of government overreach. Reagan in particular was successful at bringing together a mix of economic libertarians and fundamentalist Christians with an agreement that the libertarians would be free to focus on de-regulation of the economy while the fundamentalist Christians would be free to war against abortion, sexual liberation, and all the other heretical parts of the modern age. The unifying theme was Reagan’s famous quote, which is still central to the GOP ethos today:

Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.

From the 80s to the 00s, a great deal of conservative political energy was focused on resistance to “the homosexual agenda”. It seems the GOP has lost so decisively on this issue that many seem to have suppressed any memory of Republican efforts to deny gay people basic human rights. Yet, as recently as 2004, Bush strategist Karl Rove was able to weaponise anti-gay marriage ballot measures to get Bush re-elected, a move that subsequent GOP strategists repeated in the 2010s with trans bathroom bills. The same playbook is still in use today, the target has simply shifted from gay people to trans people. One could also argue that the “war on terror” was a key part of the culture war. Muslims have not fared as well in terms of a sudden turnaround in acceptance, but the focus on them has waned, at least in America, as the battle over “wokeness” has gained ascendancy.

Culture war radicaliation hit another major speed boost with the election of Barak “did you know his middle name is Hussein?” Obama. This should have come as no surprise, but the intensity of the blowback was still unnerving. It wasn’t necessary for racism to be conscious in the minds of every GOP individual, though it was clearly conscious for many. Racial anxiety seems to work on a variety of levels. Research suggests our minds can mask it as economic anxiety, thereby generating a victimhood permission structure that justifies the anxiety. The key evidence that Obama’s response produced a unique reaction, besides the historic resistance by the GOP towards policies they previously supported, is the substantial uptick in membership amongst the sorts of radical organiations we saw storming the Capitol Building on January 6th. These militias feared that Democrats would use governmental tyranny to force a victory in the culture war, seizing guns and destroying traditional values once and for all. That fear was weirdly intensified by a president of colour, who presented an unavoidable visual reminder of a changing world.

Enter, Donald Trump

It was this energy that Trump harnessed, first with Birtherism and then with “Make America Great Again”, a phrase that exemplifies the traditional values side of the culture war divide. Trump knew how to activate culture war fragility in his followers, using it to isolate them and then using that isolation to heighten their anxiety further. Trump took the fertile ground the GOP had cultivated for 60 years and easily turned it into a cult of personality, with himself as the champion of traditional values, despite having lived a life that exemplified the opposite. There was a debate during the 2016 election over how many of Trump’s followers took him “seriously but not literally”. I think the storming of the Capitol makes it clear that, for many MAGA supporters, it was both.

Hopefully all this makes clear why my outlook on culture war armistice remains grim. Despite being out of office, Trump is still the leader of the GOP. The recent removal of Liz Cheney from GOP leadership merely for criticising Trump’s persistent and dangerous promotion of a “big lie” around his election loss proves that the GOP has no intention of bucking its current spiral. Meanwhile, racial animus itself isn’t going away, and there are a cadre of well-poisoners out there making sure any discussion on the subject is doomed from the start.

Take, for example, Chris Rufo, who I previously highlighted enjoying white nationalist memes with his face on them. Rufo is a conservative pundit who has continued the Southern strategy tradition of using euphemisms with his attack on Critical Race Theory, a view he admits he has willfully misrepresented to create a racially charged boogieman that doesn’t get the same blowback as overt racism:

Tweet from Christopher F. Rufo, Twitter handle @RealChrisRufo, from March 15th. Tweet reads "We have successfully frozen their brand -- "critical race theory" -- into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eveneutally turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category"
Tweet from Christopher F. Rufo, Twitter handle @RealChrisRufo, from March 15th. Tweet is in reply to @RealChrisRufo and @ConceptualJames. Tweet reads "The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire rang eof cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans."

Genuine social progress

If the culture war has been this constant tool of GOP politics, does that mean it really is a distraction from genuine progress? I don’t think so, because the culture war has also been a site of genuine success for progressive elements, and not just to get political power but also to enact some amount of social justice. It’s hard to imagine that the shift in opinion towards gay rights would have happened so quickly, relatively speaking, without concerted efforts by gay rights activists to fight the culture war on as many fronts as possible, from media representation to the mainstreaming of HIV/AIDS as an issue that extends beyond the gay community, to the centering of violence against LGBTQ youths like Matthew Shepard. Similarly, there is some hope that continued mainstreaming of democratic socialist ideas provides a path for addressing wealth inequality, a major exacerbating factor in the current culture war.

I wish I had more positive things to say about the right’s role in the American Culture War, but the traditional values they’ve chosen to defend seem deeply immoral to me. The most I can say in favor of the conservative position is that human society is changing very rapidly. Change can bring conflict and the risk that some valuable knowledge may be lost along the way. I do hope that conservatives can find a way to promote traditional values that really have retained their importance, such as community, and resist the urge to tie those values to things better left in the past, like regressive gender roles and sexual norms.

In future articles, I will look more closely at individuals and organisations involved in globalising the culture wars, as well as the focus on education as a key battlefield. For now, let me just say that the fight is worth fighting, and while we may sometimes be skeptical that progress is possible, it’s worth persevering, because you really can’t know which way things will break next.

Making vaccines convenient and accessible helps minimise the impact of vaccine hesitancy

Wendy M. Grossman
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Making vaccines convenient and accessible helps minimise the impact of vaccine hesitancy

A recent research paper seems to provide the best-ever motivation to get a COVID-19 shot: the virus can lurk in penile tissue and cause erectile dysfunction. I feel this story deserves wider publicity.

As soon as trials began, both the British and American press began fretting about vaccine resisters. Six months ago, when supplies were thin and demand was high, it didn’t matter. Now that supply is adequate and new, more infectious variants are turning up, finding solutions is more urgent. In surveys, 28% of Americans say they will wait and see or only get vaccinated if required to do so. The remaining 14% say they won’t do it at all. UK hesitancy numbers are much lower, and dropping.

Many of us struggle to understand why anyone would resist, given the last year’s events. But humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk. It’s easy to believe that smart and careful should be enough to keep us safe from infection, and if it isn’t, we simply had bad luck. Getting vaccinated, though, is an active choice, and if something goes wrong, it means we chose wrong.

“Vaccine hesitancy” is a deceptively unitary term for a phenomenon with many causes. Access to vaccines is uneven; Bolton MP Yasmin Qureschi has complained about the unfairness of calling hospitalised Covid patients “hesitant” when the centralised vaccination site was prohibitively difficult for many to reach and too time-consuming for those on zero-hours contracts. In non-white communities, historical distrust of doctors and medical researchers is best mediated by community leaders and engagement with their concerns. Other populations who fear the vaccine because it’s new ought to see their concerns dissipating naturally now that millions have been vaccinated with very few problems.

Logistical deterrents are being fixed by better access; Bolton and numerous US cities are sending out vaccinations buses. “It was convenient,” one woman told MSNBC when asked why she’d said yes the day the mobile team knocked on her door.

Some US states are trying blatant bribes. New Jersey is offering a free beer with every shot, West Virginia promises a $100 savings bond to each vaccinated resident between 16 and 35, and Maryland is giving $100 to vaccinated state employees. In the Ohio lottery five vaccinated people will win $1 million each.

A pharmacist explained his most effective approach. “I call and say I have a vaccination reserved for you. People hate giving up something that’s reserved for them.”

A pharmacist explained to Full Frontal with Samantha Bee his most effective approach. “I call and say I have a vaccination reserved for you,” he said. “People hate giving up something that’s reserved for them.”

The psychology underlying that story reminded me of a 1980s astrology study in which Shawn Carlson found that the more personalised students believed their horoscope to be the more highly they rated it.

Psychological manipulation has been embraced by Silicon Valley ever since 2008, when Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler published their book Nudge. Their basic idea was that you could – like when the magician says “Take any card” and you somehow always pick the card they intended – engineer free choice so that people make the “right” decisions. Professionals in the field they dubbed “choice architecture” rearrange foods in student cafeterias so the healthy items are prominent, rethink security policies so it’s easier to do the safe thing than the risky thing, and, more sinister, create the web’s “dark patterns” that make it much harder to cancel a subscription than to sign up for one.

The UK government embraced this approach, setting up the Behavioural Insights Team in 2010. The “nudge unit” has run trials of messages designed to push people to pay taxes and fines and supplied cheap labour to encourage people to clear out and insulate their lofts. Early in the pandemic, it created the hand-washing advice that, we now know, was more or less useless since the virus spreads through the air.

No strategy yet discussed would work on a vaccine-resistant friend in the northeastern US who believes her stash of garlic, vitamin D, vitamin C, homeopathic remedies, and high-quality local hospital means “I’m not afraid of a mild flu-like illness.” She admits that eventually she will give in under pressure of either travel requirements or family pressure.

This friend is finding a wide variety of answers when she asks people why they got vaccinated. Some want to travel, some hope to be free of fear, some want to return to normal.

“You must feel so liberated,” a different friend emailed when I got my second shot. And no, not really. Even with the easing restrictions, many things I like are still closed and likely to remain so for a while, and in so many parts of the world the virus still rages out of control. So no, not liberated.

Recovering memories: How the Satanic Panic led to false reports of horrific abuse

Chris French
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Recovering memories: How the Satanic Panic led to false reports of horrific abuse

Content note: this article contains mentions of extreme violence

There are some great quotations regarding lessons from history. Winston Churchill is one of many to express the notion that, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. Aldous Huxley wisely noted, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history” while Stephen Hawking opined, somewhat cynically, that, “We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity.”

All of those quotations have some relevance to the topic I intend to cover in this two-part article: the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and, in the second part, the risk that such a phenomenon could be repeated if we are not careful. Back in the 1980s, the idea took hold that Satanic ritual abuse was a widespread problem involving large international networks of very powerful people. Such abuse was said to be of the most extreme form imaginable, involving group orgies, rape, forced abortions, paedophilic acts, incest, animal and human sacrifices (including babies), the eating of flesh and faeces, and the drinking of blood.

Given the allegedly widespread nature of this activity, why were there not hundreds of people turning up at police stations to report these heinous crimes? Firstly, those involved, as stated, were said to be very powerful and thus, it was claimed, able to remove any physical evidence. But a second major factor was one that had huge implications for our understanding of the human mind itself. It was widely accepted that victims of such abuse simply could not remember being abused.

Such a belief was based upon acceptance of the psychoanalytic concept of repression. The idea is that when someone experiences extreme trauma, especially sexual abuse, an automatic psychological defence mechanism kicks in and pushes the memory for the trauma into an unconscious part of the mind where it is no longer accessible. That does not mean, however, that the trauma memory can no longer do any damage. It is claimed that it can still cause severe psychological problems, albeit that the cause of the problems may not be immediately apparent. Sometimes the repressed memories may subsequently spontaneously re-emerge into consciousness but more often than not they will only be brought back into awareness as a result of psychotherapy. Many psychotherapists believed that such memories had to be recovered, no matter how emotionally painful that process may be, if psychological health was to be achieved.

A family photo album from the side on - the photos aren't identifiable from the shot.

Back in the 1980s, there appeared to be an epidemic of such cases. Individuals would enter into therapy suffering from common psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, or low self-esteem, believing that they had enjoyed a happy, normal childhood. Many would end up believing that they had, in fact, been the victims of horrendous abuse, typically at the hands of their own parents, and they would have vivid, painful memories to support that belief. In some cases, the memories involved ritualised abuse at the hands of Satanic cults. It was claimed that such extreme abuse often caused the complete fragmentation of the mind, resulting in what used to be called multiple personality disorder but is now known as dissociative identity disorder. It was claimed that, in such cases, the individual no longer had a single unified sense of self but instead consisted of multiple selves (or ‘alters’), each with its own name, personality, preferences, mannerisms, and even memories.

To give a relatively simple hypothetical example, Personality A, an individual’s central personality, may have no awareness whatsoever of Personalities B and C – or of ever being the victim of abuse. Personality B may have access to Personality A’s memories but not those of Personality C. Personality C may have no awareness of the other two but s/he will be the only one to recall the original trauma. The individual suffering from dissociative identity disorder was typically unaware of their condition until it was diagnosed by a psychotherapist. Instead, they were simply aware of a puzzling personal history in which they would suddenly find themselves in strange cities with no knowledge of how they got there or else being told by friends of things that they had done but with no corresponding memories. In some cases, it was claimed that individuals might have dozens or even hundreds of alters. Lurid tales of Satanic abuse were featured heavily in magazines and on daytime TV shows as the number of such cases continued to grow.

It goes without saying that these allegations had very serious consequences. Families were torn apart. Accused parents stood trial and were often convicted and sentenced to years in prison. The big question was, of course, were these real memories of events that had taken place in objective reality? Or were they false memories, produced unintentionally by the therapy itself?

This was not, however, the only line of evidence supporting the existence of widescale Satanic abuse in the 1980s. There was also a spate of allegations in the US claiming that workers in day care centres were engaged in these despicable acts. One of the most notorious cases was the McMartin Preschool case. Over 350 children were identified as victims leading to the arrest of Raymond Buckey, his mother, and five other workers at the centre in 1984. By 1990, charges were dropped against all but Raymond Buckey and his mother due to lack of evidence. At trial, Buckey was acquitted of most charges and his mother was acquitted of all. It had been the longest and most expensive trial in US legal history. Buckey was retried on eight charges but the case was dismissed after the jury was deadlocked. During this period, over a hundred centres were investigated over similar allegations, including some in the UK, Europe, and Australia.

The one silver lining to emerge from this nightmarish situation was that it generated much research into the question of susceptibility to false memories. The results of such studies demonstrated conclusively that people are far more susceptible to the development of false memories – including detailed memories for entire events that simply never happened – than most of us might have assumed.

One technique that has been used by experimental psychologists in many studies to reliably implant false memories in volunteers was first used by renowned memory expert, Professor Elizabeth Loftus. It is sometimes referred to as the “lost in a shopping mall” technique. In the first studies of this kind, volunteers were interviewed ostensibly to get them to recall, in as much detail as possible, events from their own childhood. Participants were assured that all of the incidents referred to had really happened, as confirmed by other family members. In fact, this was true of all but one incident – getting lost in a shopping mall at a young age, being distressed, and ultimately being reunited with parents. Other family members confirmed that this had actually not happened. Not surprisingly, when first asked about this incident, participants reported that they could not remember it. However, they were asked to go away and see if they could recall any details at all. They were interviewed again on two further occasions and by the third interview, a quarter of the participants reported false memories for the event, sometimes adding many further details to the original suggestion. Since then, studies using this technique have successfully implanted false memories for a range of other events including being the victim of a serious animal attack, being injured by another child, and being involved in a serious accident.

Various other techniques have also been developed that can achieve similar effects, many of which, like the repeated interviewing technique just described, mimic to some extent the techniques used in dubious forms of psychotherapy to allegedly recover traumatic memories. These include getting individuals to simply imagine events which they initially report never happened to them, dream interpretation, and hypnotic regression. It is worth noting that hypnotic regression is also used to ‘recover’ memories of alien abduction and ‘past-life memories’.

In light of the findings from such studies, the risks of generating false memories during certain forms of psychotherapy became more widely appreciated. Lindsay and Read succinctly summarised why these therapeutic contexts were so risky:

… extreme forms of memory work in psychotherapy combine virtually all of the factors that have been shown to increase the likelihood of illusory memories or beliefs: (a) a trusted authority communicates a rationale for the plausibility of hidden memories of long-ago childhood trauma (that many clients have hidden memories, that the client’s psychological symptoms, physical symptoms, and dreams evidence them, and that doubt is a sign of “denial”) and (b) a trusted authority provides motivation for attempting to recover such memories (that healing is contingent on retrieving hidden memories); (c) the client is repeatedly exposed to suggestive information from multiple sources (anecdotes in popular books, other survivor’s stories, comments and interpretations offered by the therapist, etc.), providing a “script” for recovering memories as well as suggestions about particular details; and (d) techniques such as hypnosis and guided imagery enhance imagery and lower response criterion such that people are more willing to interpret thoughts, feelings, and images as memories.

It became increasingly apparent in the 1990s that memories of alleged Satanic abuse recovered during therapy simply could not be trusted. In many cases, it was possible to prove beyond all doubt that these memories did not correspond to any real events whatsoever. Furthermore, the concept of dissociative identity disorder was rejected by many critics who argued convincingly that it was unintentionally produced by the therapy itself. The tables were turned and suddenly it was certain therapists who found themselves in the dock, accused of implanting false memories.

But what about the testimony from hundreds of children in day care centres? With the benefit of hindsight, we can clearly see that the children were subjected to entirely inappropriate forms of questioning. Essentially, repeated denials from the children that they had been abused were completely disregarded until eventually the children would simply give up their denials and assent to the suggestions of abuse that were put to them. At this point, they would be praised and rewarded.

Another important factor in leading many people to realise that, in fact, Satanic abuse was not occurring was the complete lack of any physical forensic evidence to back up the claims. Bearing in mind the nature of the horrendous crimes that were alleged to have taken place, there ought to have been at least a smattering of bodily fluids to occasionally be found – not to mention, bodies of murdered victims – but no, there was absolutely nothing.

The heated debate regarding whether or not memories for traumatic events really are repressed raged throughout the 1990s and on into this century. Recently, however, a number of commentators have declared that the so-called “memory wars” are over – and that the sceptics won. They believe that no one takes seriously either the concept of repression or the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. If only that were true. Sadly, there are many signs that the memory wars are far from over, as I will discuss in my next article.

If we’re going to convince the vaccine hesitant, we need to tackle conspiratorial thinking

Dave Hahn
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If we’re going to convince the vaccine hesitant, we need to tackle conspiratorial thinking

We began waking up to the reality of this pandemic about fourteen months ago. By 20 March 2020, the virus had claimed its 10,000th victim. This grim milestone would only be a fraction of the death count a year later. As the disease spread, conspiracy theories spread with it. In the beginning, the conspiracy theories and theorists primarily caused panic by focusing on the apocalyptic nature of the disease, exaggerating the deadliness of the contagion as they did during the Ebola outbreak of 2014. As the infection rate rose along with the corresponding deaths, the theories and theorists began shifting tone. In late March, everyone should have stood up and paid attention when the first 5G cellular tower was lit on fire in the village of Melling. This act of arson was followed shortly by the immolation of two more cellular towers in Aintree and Aigburth.

The three towers would be followed by dozens more. Each one essential to the transmission of cellular communications. Each tower emitted harmless radio frequencies that allow us to download movies, games, and I suppose, make the occasional phone call as well. We know this kind of radiation is harmless as Einstein’s Nobel prize-winning paper described in 1905 that only electromagnetic frequencies above ultra-violet can affect chemical changes. Yet, the towers were set ablaze based on a pseudo-scientific conspiracy theory that 5G causes Covid. By early May, 76 more towers had been torched based on this unsound belief. As the towers went up, their glow should have been beacons of warning that we, as a civilisation, were not only going to be fighting a physical virus but a social one as well.

Panic was always going to be part of the equation. Pandemics are like that, and panic can take many forms. My current state governor, Andrew Cuomo, threatened the public with a state-funded hand sanitiser release because the panic-stricken were being exploited by those hoarding the fluid. Toilet paper had vanished from stores in the non-bidet parts of the world. There was a brief period around this time when the conspiracy theories died down a bit, which was taken as cause for hope. That hope was misplaced.

What was apparently happening was that the conspiracy theorists were waiting to discover what the official story was before launching a salvo of claims against it. According to one of the most important academic papers on the subject, conspiracy theories run against official stories as a matter of necessity. While the world waited for the medical, scientific, and governmental officials of the world to inform us of the situation, the conspiracy theories waited to find out the specifics they were going to scream “fake!”. Faces familiar to skeptics began offering CAM treatments for defeating the virus and subsequent infection. Jim Bakker began selling a silver solution and was shut down by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Alex Jones similarly was shut down for selling a silver-based toothpaste. This list includes Brazilian president Jair Balsanaro and former U.S. President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated faith in hydroxychloroquine, long after it was proven to be ineffective at treatment. Trump also, in a press conference pitched sunlight and bleach as a treatment as well.

These claims were, at least, made by people who believed the virus was real. While they pushed their wares in the name of profiting from others’ likely infection, the virus was an actual virus to them. However, there was no shortage of people claiming the virus was not real, that it was an inert thing activated by those 5G towers. Some claimed that this entire pandemic was foretold in an obscure paper financed by the evil duo of Bill Gates and George Soros. Currently, their dialogue has shifted, and we should be very concerned by the head start that their push has.

A mobile phone mast pictured from below

Writer/podcaster Noah Lugeons wrote a book (and an article for this website) in which he places significant responsibility for the spread of the virus on religion. The responsibility is of significance in the U.S., where Christian religious organisations have found a sympathetic legal system willing to grant them novel extra-legal rights; however, religion is not the cause of the global problem we are facing right now.

It was not religion that burned down the 5G towers last year; it was a conspiracy belief. It is not religion that created the idea of a Gates/Soros plan to inject everyone with microchips to… well, that part of the conspiracy theory is unclear. While Lugeons would likely respond by pointing out that the Venn diagram in the United States between people who believe in these conspiracy theories and those who also have a religious belief will be a circle, they are not necessarily related. Very few mainstream religious groups reject vaccination, for instance, even the Vatican is sidestepping their usual condemnation of anything derived from abortion for this pandemic.

As of this writing, 25% of Americans will refuse the vaccine if offered, with another 5% undecided. The refusal comes down to one of two things: fears that the vaccine is either ineffective or unsafe (Callaghan et al. 2021). Hopefully, we can set the former group aside as infection and death rates have plummeted since the vaccine rollouts began. The latter group is fed by conspiracy theory claims that are a familiar song: evil giant pharma overlords seeking profit (this conspiracy theory only makes sense in the U.S.), dangerous RNA technology turning us into mutants, and the planned genocides of Gates/Soros/Rothschilds.

The current battle is for the hearts and minds of the population. Convincing enough people to get the vaccinations is going to require overcoming conspiratorial thinking. This is not an easy task as conspiratorial ideation appeals to people emotionally. Psychological studies show that conspiracy theories attract those with intense levels of confidence but low levels of inquisitiveness and humility. The problem has been the view of mainstream society’s inattention to this subject. The perception has been that conspiracy theories and theorists were fringe beliefs occupying the more obscure corners of the world and the places on the internet decent folks avoid. We know after Brexit, after Trump’s presidency, and now during the pandemic that these theories and those that push them have severe effects that cannot and must not be ignored.

The Battersea Poltergeist, and the role of the paranormal investigator

Deborah Hyde
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The Battersea Poltergeist, and the role of the paranormal investigator

If you haven’t yet listened to the BBC podcast ‘The Battersea Poltergeist’, treat yourself. Producer Danny Robins has an impressive track record making entertaining, open-minded supernatural content. In ‘The Battersea Poltergeist’, he has artfully combined dramatic reconstructions with commentary to introduce us to a lesser-known British case from the 1950s.

Russell Hope Robbins’ 1959 classic ‘Encyclopedia of Witchcraft & Demonology’ lists the four key poltergeist indicators. They are: noises, knockings or footsteps; telekinesis; disappearance of small objects and their rediscovery later; and major disasters, such as arson.

Tick.

And this case conforms to another poltergeist standard, in that a very young woman was at the centre of the phenomena. Shirley Hitchings was the only girl in a working-class family, living among her extended family in an emotional web that Robins does a very good job of dramatically reconstructing.

But there is another vital role in the social dynamic of poltergeist cases, one that is more easily overlooked.

Harold ‘Chib’ Chibbett (1900-1978) - a black and white photo of a balding man with whisps of white hair, dark rimmed glasses and a pipe. He's standing in front of a window, outside, with his hands on the window ledge and he's wearing a three piece suit with a shirt and tie.
Harold ‘Chib’ Chibbett (1900-1978)

Harold Chibbett (1900-1978), or ‘Chib’, was a psychic investigator. Chib had met such luminaries as Aleister Crowley in his lifelong search to understand occult phenomena. Perhaps more poignantly he had also met ghost-hunter Harry Price whose fame and success Chib hoped to replicate. If only he could find the right case …

Chib seems to have authentically believed in the Battersea poltergeist. He spent hours and nights at the house recording events, and became a close family friend. Unfortunately for him, Battersea did not enter the poltergeist Hall-of-Fame until now, many years after his death. Even the 2013 book by Shirley Hitchings and James Clark ‘The Poltergeist Prince of London’ didn’t make it as notorious as, for example, Enfield.

Poltergeist cases usually start with young women who don’t have a lot of ‘clout’. However strange their stories, they need the momentum of a ‘facilitator’ to make the case known to a wider audience.

Facilitators come ready-integrated into receptive networks; they can get plenty of traction with less effort. Facilitators have strong personal motives for their work. With many of them, Chib included I think, there is a genuine and strong desire to establish the fact of life after death.

Facilitators are usually more educated, at least on their favoured subject. Their knowledge of historical cases contributes to the participants’ ability to author an improvised ‘script’, with its inevitable escalation. Facilitators don’t just publicise the story; they provoke it with the attention they bring.

When you’re aware of the facilitator role you can identify them in historical poltergeist cases. We know about the 1663 ‘Drummer of Tedworth’ case not from the afflicted family, the Mompessons, but from the writings of a visiting clergyman Joseph Glanvill. He attributed the case to “some Daemon or Spirit” and wrote the case up in his 1681 ‘Saducisimus Triumphatus’. Glanvill was concerned that a new rationalism could remove God from the world:  

“…those that dare not bluntly say there is no God, content themselves… to deny there are spirits or witches”.

The Fox Sisters, whose playful pranks and raucous toe-cracking inadvertently precipitated the nineteenth century new religious movement of Spiritualism, were too young and isolated to have started a career entirely by themselves. They were promoted by radical Quakers Amy and Isaac Post whose counter-cultural community provided the social heft that a couple of attention-seeking teenagers couldn’t. I’ll have a video about the circumstances surrounding the Fox Sisters on my YouTube channel in the next few weeks.

I’m a strong believer that the strange phenomena at Enfield would have disappeared were it not for the ongoing presence of the psychic investigators Guy Lyon Playfair and Maurice Grosse. Chib seemed to play the same avuncular role within the Hitchings family at Battersea.

The ‘facilitator’ dynamic can be seen in other allegedly supernatural contexts: the harm of other people’s social drama has been filtered and amplified by theologians, witch-hunters and self-appointed authorities for years. In the 1612 case of the Pendle witches, a local Justice of the Peace, Roger Nowell, sought to make a name for himself by investigating a stroke suffered by a pedlar. Two local families were implicated in witchcraft: one person died in prison and another ten survived to be hanged.

Even the case of the Cottingley Fairies needed a promoter. Creator of the world’s most evidence-led detective, Arthur Conan-Doyle, was a mystic who – like may of his generation – sought evidence of other planes of existence and life-after-death. He was gullible enough to fall for Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths’ hoax fairy photos, which are now known as the ‘Cottingley Fairies’.

I contributed to the ninth episode of the Battersea Poltergeist and touched on Chib’s role. I hope you enjoy it. Throughout the series, the skeptical strand was very ably contributed by Dr. Ciarán O’Keeffe.

An old newspaper article about the Battersea Poltergeist case listing Shirley Hitchings as a "vivaciously attractive 15-year-old of Wycliffe-road, Battersea".

Reformation’s poster-boy Martin Luther (1483-1586) was one of the first to use the word ‘poltergeist’, which he listed as the fifth worst abuse of the Roman Catholic Church. He was a fervent man and a prolific writer, so we can only be grateful that he ran out of paper by the time he got to number one hundred and fourteen.

His meaning was that an institution and the men within it, an institution which had social heft and credibility, validated the belief in a probably-non-existent phenomenon because it could integrate this phenomenon into its worldview. Moreover, it had a remedy for it.

It’s a reminder that the creation of ghosts, poltergeists and gods is a social enterprise; each supernatural being needs attention to thrive. And the really successful memes are the ones with influential people behind them.

“Fake Medicine”: Dr Brad McKay skilfully takes apart health advice from Dr Google

Edzard Ernst
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“Fake Medicine”: Dr Brad McKay skilfully takes apart health advice from Dr Google

If I search on Amazon for books on Alternative Medicine, I get between 50,000 and 60,000 volumes, depending on what country I am in. As a very rough guess, I estimate that about 95% of them are rubbish – not just useless, but dangerous. Because of this lamentable situation, I am excited each time I come across one that belongs to the other 5%. And in recent years, there have been quite a few.

No, don’t worry, I am not about to advertise another book of mine; I want to recommend to you Fake Medicine, by Dr Brad McKay

The new book is advertised with the following blurb:

“Dr Brad McKay, Australian GP and science communicator, has seen the rise of misinformation permeate our lives and watched as many of us have turned away from health experts. Too often, we place our trust in online influencers, celebrities and Dr Google when it comes to making important health decisions. Fake Medicine explores the potential dangers of wellness warriors, anti-vaxxers, fad diets, dodgy supplements, alternative practitioners and conspiracy theories. This book is an essential tool for debunking pseudoscience and protecting you and your loved ones from the health scams that surround us. Protect your mind, body and wallet by fighting fake medicine.”

The cover of Dr Brad McKay's book: Fake Medicine. The cover has a blue gradient background with a photo of a worried looking person wearing black eye make up and a tin foil hat. Over the top of the photo is black text on a yellow box background with the words "Fake Medicine" and "Exposing the wellness crazes, cons and quacks costing us our health".

It describes the book fairly accurately. McKay covers all of these subjects with considerable skill. His book is well-suited for people who are newcomers to the critical assessment of so-called alternative medicine (SCAM); the text is free of jargon or long-winded technical explanations. Instead, the author mostly tells stories of events that actually happened to him, often in a most personal fashion. Take, for instance, his experience as a young gay Australian with a form of ‘conversion therapy’ administered by religious zealots, or the story where he took some dodgy Chinese medicine to boost his energy levels.

Lots of people have done similarly unwise things, of course, but not many of those people are doctors who can thus put their experience into a medical perspective. And crucially, not many can write as entertainingly as McKay. I had thought I knew most of what there is to know about SCAM, but I did learn something new from McKay’s new book: did you know what Gish Gallop is? Well, I didn’t!

One of the most useful parts of the book is chapter 16 where McKay tells everyone what they can and should do to stop fake medicine in its tracks. And he really does mean EVERYONE! – not just skeptics or sceptics or activists or scientists. This book is truly written for laypeople. You don’t belong to this group? Buy Fake Medicine anyway and give it to someone from your circle of friends who needs it. I am sure there are a few.

Falsification: Karl Popper’s guide to telling real science from pseudoscience

Jonny Thomson
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Falsification: Karl Popper’s guide to telling real science from pseudoscience

It can feel, at times, as if there’s a deafening barrage of misinformation, pseudoscience and propaganda. It can feel like there’s no easy way to tell up from down, and right from wrong. How many times have you wished that there was a simple way to call out the charlatans, quacks and the snake oil peddlers? A way to tell the pseudoscience from real science? A simple tool to give truth to the lie?

This is exactly what Karl Popper was concerned with, and his ‘Falsification’ is not only a bedrock of the scientific method, but it can act as a hugely practical and effective tool for everyday scepticism.

Hume’s Problem and Popper’s Solution

Popper’s theory first took form as an attempt both to resolve David Hume’s Problem of Induction and improve on the failings of what is known as “Verificationism”.

In brief, this is the problem that states that, no matter how many times we observe something, we can never say something ‘definitely is’ the case. Not only is it nigh on impossible to measure all of something, there’s also no philosophically watertight reason that the future has to be like the past. Any observation of how things are at the moment, or how they have been, cannot rationally prove that those things must hold true in the future. In Hume’s words:

“It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future”.

Let us take an example. Imagine we’re good scientists, and have done a lot of fieldwork studying bats. We’ve noted their nocturnal habits, and so make the claim “all bats are nocturnal”. Hume’s Problem says that, firstly, this is unjustified because we have not examined all bats, everywhere. But, more devastatingly, even if we did measure all bats, everywhere, we cannot promise or guarantee that “all bats will always be nocturnal”. Tomorrow, a particularly industrious bat might decide to put in some early morning work.

All science is based on induction of this kind, and philosophers since Hume have seen this doubt as a huge problem for the scientific method. If induction cannot be justified, or has no rational basis, then what does that mean for science?

Popper’s solution is a subtle and intelligent way out. He argued that a scientific statement is not proven but it is simply not yet disproved. Science does not verify things, per se, but rather seeks to provide contrary data points to a theory. So, gravity is a strong scientific law because, despite all the dropped things over the centuries, it still stubbornly insists on smashing them to bits. Or, every time I see a nocturnal bat, I’m disproving the statement, “bats are diurnal” (as it happens, bats aren’t all nocturnal, but most are).

How Popper takes on pseudoscience

According to Falsification, then, a proposition, theory or hypothesis is only as strong as how far it can resist falsifying evidence.

And this fits well with the history of science. So often in the past it’s been common for various theories to be accepted until something comes along to prove otherwise. For instance, thanks to Hippocrates and then Galen, the “humoral theory” was viewed as established biology. This argued that all disease was due to an imbalance of four fluids in our body. This was “true” until sufficient evidence was presented to falsify it; that is to say, we discovered cellular pathology. So, we now had another theory of disease, and all subsequent experiments show that this isn’t wrong (yet).

Not only does Popper change how we understand science, but he also offers us a hugely helpful tool to use in combatting pseudoscience. Under Falsification, if a theory cannot be falsified, where no possible evidence can disprove it, then it must be dismissed as quackery and hokum.

Popper, himself, applied his theory (quite aggressively, at times) to Marxism and psychoanalysis.

With Marxism, Popper thought that a lot of Marx’s historical arguments started out as genuinely scientific and meaningful analyses. Marx, for instance, gave a quite specific account of “the coming social revolution”. Yet, when such a revolution failed to manifest in the way that Marx predicted, Popper believed Marxists “reinterpreted both the theory and the evidence” and so made their overall position unfalsifiable. They had “made it irrefutable”.

With psychoanalysis (particularly that of Freud and Adler), Popper saw much of the same. For instance, presented with a man who seemingly has no object-obsession with his mother (a falsifying data point against Freudianism), the Freudian could reply ‘Ah! Well, it’s just repressed! It’ll be there’. Everything about a person, every character trait, every utterance, every action came to be refashioned to fit psychoanalysis. Popper’s question would be, what would it take for psychoanalysis to be wrong? He believed there wasn’t anything.

How we can use Popper

We can all use Falsification to help us wade through a world of fake news, superstition and conspiracy theories.

For instance, let us suppose an astrologer tells you, “People who are Aquarius are easy going”, and you reply with, “Actually my best friend is an Aquarian, and he’s the most highly-strung guy I know”. How do they respond? If they admit this is a contrary datapoint, and they’ll need to revise their theory, then Popper and sceptics everywhere ought to be quite happy. Most often, this doesn’t happen. The evidence, in some way, is explained away: “Oh, I bet he’s easy-going when he’s comfortable” or “Oh, he was born in 1986?! That year was different”.

Or, suppose someone believes that 9/11 was an inside job. You might show them evidence that a jet plane can and does bring down a building like the World Trade Centre, or that jet fuel has been proven again and again to melt steel-framed buildings. But, if they then say “Oh, that scientist was paid to say that” or “They’re lying”, there’s no way out of it – you’re dealing with pseudoscience. Again, conspiracy theories beg the question: what will it take to disprove their theory?

Of course, we’re all human and we’re all guilty of confirmation bias, where we’ll seek out things that agree with our views, but Popper offers us a great way to examine and improve our own beliefs. So, if a friend ever offers to read your fortune or tells you that the world is run by extra-terrestrial reptiles, ask them what fact would make them abandon their view? If they say none, take Popper’s advice, and walk away.

Coping with Death: Why the 5 stages of grief don’t tell the whole story

Sarah Hearne
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Coping with Death: Why the 5 stages of grief don’t tell the whole story

As we pass the milestone of living for a full twelve months in a pandemic it’s inevitable that people will reflect on what the year has brought. We’ve seen people struggle with mental health, loneliness, zoom fatigue, lockdown fatigue. Yet there’s been little focus on one of the most profound of emotions that many are feeling as a consequence of the pandemic: grief. Grief is still an incredibly private emotion for many of us in the UK. There are cultures that have very different, and arguably much healthier, approaches but here, for many, it is something to be dealt with alone. Stiff upper lip and all that.

As we find it difficult to talk to people about our emotions, it’s somewhat inevitable that we will turn to pop culture and the media to guide us. And when it comes to grief there is one model that has permeated – the five stages of grief. These stages have been a mainstay of films, TV and books since they were first described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her hugely influential 1969 book On Death and Dying.

Also known as the Kübler-Ross model, it was originally (and only) intended to describe the emotional journey that terminally ill patients often find themselves on. It was never supposed to be an instruction manual, and was never intended for use outside of palliative care. Kübler-Ross never even called them stages or showed that any individual patient experienced all five[1]. But the model has taken on a life of its own that even its originator lamented[2]. These stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – have become the commonly accepted way that grief does and should progress. But does this model reflect reality?

As I’m writing this piece for The Skeptic, I’m pretty sure you’ve guessed already that the answer is ‘no’. The Kübler-Ross model is well-known, pervasive, and wrong. That’s not to say that it’s completely unhelpful – the emotions described in it are all commonly experienced during the grieving process, but they don’t happen in a particular order and they aren’t experienced in isolation. For example, you don’t go through your ‘anger’ phase where all you feel is anger and then never feel angry about your loss again.

Now, you might say “who cares?” If the model is helpful does it matter if it’s not right? My response is that it we’d have to show that it was helpful first, and the research suggests that it’s really not. As far back as 1993, Dr Charles Corr wrote in the journal Death Studies:

“some of the most knowledgeable and sophisticated clinicians who work with those who are coping with dying have made clear their view that the stage-based model put forth by Kübler-Ross is inadequate, superficial, and misleading.” [3]

Alternative Models

The five stages of grief were never meant to describe the process of grieving that follows the death of a loved one. So when it comes to bereavement, what are people to do? Is there a model that people can turn to in order to help process and navigate their grief, and to identify when their grieving has become unhealthy? There is. It’s called the Dual Process Model. It was described by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut in their 1999 paper[4], which they have subsequently revised in 2010[5] and 2016[6]. So what is this Dual Process Model? I will let the originators explain:

“The DPM specifies two types of stressors: loss orientation and restoration orientation. This specification is necessary because research has shown that bereaved people not only have to cope with the loss of the loved person himself or herself, but also have to make major adjustments in their lives that come about as secondary consequences of the death. Both of these aspects are potential sources of stress and anxiety. Loss-oriented coping thus refers to dealing with, concentrating on, and working through some aspect of the loss experience itself (e.g., crying about the death, yearning for the person, looking at his or her photograph). Restoration-oriented coping, on the other hand, includes mastering of the tasks that the bereaved person had undertaken, dealing with arrangements for reorganizing life, and developing new identities.” 5

One of the key aspects to the Dual Process Model is that those experiencing grief oscillate between their loss-oriented coping and their restoration-oriented coping. In other words, it recognises that people will have days where all they want to do is cry and look at old photos and lament their loss, and they’ll also have days where they want to be completely distracted and do things that have no association with the person they’ve lost. It recognises that switching between these two mindsets is normal and healthy and necessary to process grief and accept life without their loved one.

The model also allows for unhealthy behaviour to be identified – if someone is perpetually stuck in one coping strategy, for example – and offers bereavement councillors and other professionals guidance on how to help people with their bereavement. A 2019[7] systematic review found that the model “accurately represents the bereavement experience and can be used to understand how bereaved individuals cope”. In other words, the model works!

Loss and Covid

I began this piece talking about the pandemic so I feel I should end on that topic too. The pandemic has had a huge impact on our ability to grieve. Hospital patients have had to die alone, restrictions have been placed on how many people can attend funerals, and it has not even been possible to share a cup of tea with someone from outside your household for most of the past year, let alone a comforting hug. The potential for people to engage with restoration-oriented coping methods has been severely restricted[8] and the long-term consequences of this are, as yet, unknown.

Grieving is a process. It is unique to each and every person, and to each and every bereavement. Feeling conflicting emotions, feeling emotionally numb, and feeling overwhelmed with emotion all are part of grieving, of adjusting to the new world – a world where there’s a massive hole that feels like it will always gape wide. But over time that hole will slowly close. Signs of it will always exist, there will be a scar that will never fully fade, but the gaping maw of loss and heartbreak will fill and memories will once again bring joy rather than pain.

The five stages of grief are a simplistic representation of this process, and one that was never intended by their creator. They fail to reflect the diversity and complexity of the emotional journey that bereaved people undertake. The death toll of the pandemic has been staggering, and for each person lost there are many more who grieve for them. Understanding the complexities of that grief and not reducing it to a cliché is the least we can do.

References

[1] Corr, Charles A. 2020. “Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the ‘Five Stages’ Model in a Sampling of Recent American Textbooks.” OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying 82 (2): 294–322. https://doi.org/10.1177/0030222818809766.

[2] Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. 2009. On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families. 40th Anniversary Edition. Routledge.

[3] Corr, Charles A. 1993. “Coping with Dying: Lessons That We Should and Should Not Learn from the Work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.” Death Studies 17 (1): 69–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481189308252605

[4] Stroebe, Margaret S, and Henk Schut. 1999. “Meaning Making in the Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement.” Death Studies 23 (3): 197–224. https://doi.org/10.1037/10397-003.

[5] Stroebe, Margaret, and Henk Schut. 2010. “The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: A Decade On.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 61 (4): 273–89. https://doi.org/10.2190/OM.61.4.b.

[6] Stroebe, Margaret, and Henk Schut. 2016. “Overload: A Missing Link in the Dual Process Model?” Omega (United States) 74 (1): 96–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/0030222816666540.

[7] Fiore, Jennifer. 2019. “A Systematic Review of the Dual Process Model of Coping With Bereavement (1999–2016).” OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying. https://doi.org/10.1177/0030222819893139.

[8] Albuquerque, Sara, Ana Margarida Teixeira, and José Carlos Rocha. 2021. “COVID-19 and Disenfranchised Grief.” Frontiers in Psychiatry 12 (February): 10–13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.638874.

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