People who lose the will to live can die within a matter of days, research shows

‘Give-up-itis’ is a real condition, say scientists, who believe it can trigger a fatal chain of events

LOSING the will to live is deadly, scientists believe, after finding people can die within three weeks simply because they have given up on life.

A new review by Dr John Leach at the University of Portsmouth is the first to study the condition, known as “psychogenic death”, widely and to define its five stages.

Sometimes termed “give-up-itis”, it usually follows an emotional shock from which a person thinks there is no mental escape, which makes them dangerously apathetic about their own existence.

If not stopped, death may occur three weeks after the first stage of withdrawal, but can happen even sooner. However the syndrome is not widely accepted by scientists.

“Psychogenic death is real,” said Dr Leach. “It isn’t suicide, it isn’t linked to depression, but the act of giving up on life and dying usually within days is a very real condition often linked to severe trauma.”

Psychogenic death, also known as voodoo death, was first defined in 1942 by Harvard psychologist Walter Cannon, who noticed that it could often be triggered by the fear of supernatural consequences of breaking taboos.

Cannon also termed the “fight or flight” response and believed, in psychogenic death, that the flight response took over but the sufferer could not act on it, leading to a fatal chain of events.

By reviewing case reports from concentration camp inmates and shipwreck survivors, Dr Leach found that the first stage is social withdrawal in which sufferers exhibit lack of emotion, listlessness and indifference and become self-absorbed.

Next a deep apathy sets in where a person no longer cares about selfpreservation and instead sinks into a deep, demoralising melancholy.

The third phase is “aboulia”, in which people stop speaking and give up eating and washing, which leads to stage four, psychic akinesia, where they no longer feel even extreme pain.

Dr Leach said: “An interesting thing about aboulia is there appears to be an empty mind or a consciousness devoid of content. People at this stage who recovered describe it as having a mind like mush, or of having no thought whatsoever. In aboulia, the mind is on standby and a person has lost the drive for goal-directed behaviour.”

The final stage is death.

Dr Leach said: “Motivation is essential for coping with life and if that fails, apathy is almost inevitable.”

“Reversing the give-up-itis slide towards death tends to come when a survivor finds or recovers a sense of choice, of having some control.”

The research was published in the journal Medical Hypotheses.