Chris French: being 'crazy' and belief in the paranormal

Posted by Olly Robinson on 16 December 2008 | 2 Comments

Tags: Psychology, Paranormal Phenomena

I was at the British Psychological Society Division of Clinical Psychology conference last week on Thursday, and the keynote speaker for the morning was Prof Chris French, who is a very pleasant and intelligent sceptic, and is well known for his TV appearances. His talk was entitled ‘You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Believe in the Paranormal But it Helps’. He described a number of studies that showed a link between paranormal beliefs and the clinical construct ‘Schizotypy’. This was his evidence for a link between mental health problems and paranormal beliefs. Now, as a psychologist I am very aware what schizotypy is. It is a DSM-recognised ‘personality disorder’ in which individuals manifest ‘odd’ beliefs and ‘odd perceptual experiences’. The DSM diagnostic criteria include the following;

• odd beliefs or magical thinking that influences behavior and is inconsistent with subcultural norms (e.g., superstitiousness, belief in clairvoyance, telepathy, or "sixth sense"; in children and adolescents, bizarre fantasies or preoccupations)

• unusual perceptual experiences, including bodily illusions

• odd thinking and speech (e.g., vague, circumstantial, metaphorical, overelaborate, or stereotyped)

• inappropriate or constricted affect

• behavior or appearance that is odd, eccentric, or peculiar

This is obviously a woefully subjective list, with words such as ‘inappropriate’, ‘overelaborated’ and ‘odd’ being open to a thousand interpretations. Why on earth, you may be thinking, is this a checklist for a so called mental disorder? Well, schizotypy is category that is a ‘risk factor’ for schizophrenia. Evidence does indeed suggest that schizotypals are more likely to get schizophrenia, but so what? Women are more likely to get depressed, and that’s not a reason for not being a woman. ‘Schizotypals’ may be more likely to go a bit crazy, but are also more likely to be groundbreaking thinkers. There is no doubt that Newton was get a schizotypy diagnosis if he were alive now, for he had some pretty ‘odd’ beliefs about alchemy and spirituality.
This is a classic example of the medicalisation of human idiosyncrasy. To disavow the worth of these unusual ways of being may be protective of schizophrenia, but it may be equally protective of important unconventional thinking and colourful human difference.

So schizotypy is one of those categories that is a silly clinical construct and will very likely soon be erased from diagnostic systems, consigned to the same bin as drapetomania (the illness that made slaves want to run away). Yet Chris French was using the correlation between paranormal belief and schizotypy as the main bulk of evidence for his claim that you are probably mentally ill if you believe in the paranormal. What French’s research in fact was showing us is that people who tend to have unconventional beliefs are happy to openly report that they do indeed have such beliefs. How’s that for revolutionary. I am all for healthy scepticism, but this is shoddy science.

It feels appropriate to finish with a quote from John Stuart Mill;

“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.”

Olly Robinson