Have you ever experienced that once or every time you stand on a high cliff or the edge of Gao Qiao, or look down from the balcony of a tall building, you will have the urge to jump, and sometimes you will fantasize about the process of falling after jumping, but you have never thought of committing suicide in this way.
The other day, the media reported such a case. Modern Express reported in August 14 that within a few months after a couple moved into their new home in 3 1 building in Suzhou, the woman always had the urge to jump off the building. "When I walked into the room, I felt flustered, depressed and dizzy." Ms. Qin Wang, whose alias is Qin Wang, said that the most serious thing was that whenever she approached the balcony or window, she had the urge to jump off the building. When she moves back to her old rental house, she will return to normal. You must abide by the National People's Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC)'s Decision on Maintaining Internet Security and other relevant laws and regulations in People's Republic of China (PRC).
After many twists and turns, the couple finally came to Suqian Siyang Chinese Medicine Hospital. Zhao Jinming, a psychological counselor, pointed out: "From the perspective of environmental psychology, this is a tall building syndrome." Zhao Jinming further explained that some people will feel insecure when they live in tall buildings, and then they will feel flustered, dizzy, tired and even have the impulse to jump down. Especially women who are afraid of heights, introverted, fragile and like quiet.
Does this lady really suffer from the so-called tall building syndrome? If not, then what kind of phenomenon is this? What the hell is this phenomenon?
What is tall building syndrome?
There is no such term as "tall building syndrome" in medicine or psychology at present. Similar to the description given by Dr. Zhao, this concept is "Sick Building Syndrome" (SBS), which refers to a series of symptoms when people stay in buildings for a long time, especially in the workplace, without other definite causes and pathological changes. These symptoms may include: feeling unwell, headache and dizziness, nausea, pain and suffering, fatigue (extreme fatigue), inattention, shortness of breath or chest tightness, eye and throat irritation, nasal irritation, stuffy nose or runny nose, skin irritation (rash or dry and itchy skin) and so on. In China, it is usually translated as sick building syndrome, because it is the people in the building who are "sick" rather than the building itself, so this translation seems inappropriate.
These symptoms of SBS can be single or combined, and the symptoms of the same person in the same building at different times can also be different. Symptoms usually disappear when you leave the corresponding building.
Anyone can get into trouble because of SBS, but people who work in closed modern buildings with mechanical ventilation or air conditioning are prone to suffer, especially the copywriters who deal with display screens are "high-risk elements".
It can be seen that Ms. Zhao's problem is not the "tall building syndrome" mentioned by Dr. Zhao. So, what kind of situation is this?
High phenomenon
Although people have long noticed this phenomenon of "jumping from a height" in the crowd, some psychological explanations have also appeared. However, it was not until 20 12 that an empirical study was done, which was completed by a team of psychology department of Florida State University, and it is the only empirical study on this phenomenon so far.
In this study, the researchers named this phenomenon as "HPP" for the first time.
An Empirical Study on Height Phenomenon
The researcher conducted an online survey on 43/kloc-0 undergraduates' HPP experience frequency, suicidal ideation, anxiety sensitivity, depressive symptoms and emotional attack history, hoping to explore the HPP experience from the following three aspects: 1. The universality of HPP in the population; Second, determine whether HPP is unique to people who have suicidal thoughts, or whether it is also common in people who have no suicidal thoughts; Third, determine whether anxiety sensitivity, suicidal ideation or other negative emotions will enhance the HPP experience.
It was found that more than 30% of the participants reported that they had the urge to jump from Gao Qiao or a tall building at least once in their lives. If participants are divided into two groups according to whether they have suicidal thoughts, 17.3% of people who have never had suicidal thoughts in their lives report having experienced HPP；; ; The HPP reporting rate of those with suicidal thoughts was as high as 56.50%, which was significantly higher than that of the other group.
When they were there, more than half of the participants (53.3%) reported that they imagined jumping from Gao Qiao or a tall building. Similarly, the reporting rate of people who have had suicidal thoughts in their lifetime (74%) is much higher than that of people who have never had suicidal thoughts (43%).
When asked if they ever imagined jumping from the window of a tall building, nearly half (48.7%) of the participants replied that they had done it at least once. The reporting rate of people who have suicidal thoughts in their lifetime (57%) is also higher than that of people who have no suicidal thoughts (24%).
It can be seen that HPP is everywhere in the crowd, even those who have never had suicidal thoughts in their lives have generally experienced HPP. At the same time, by analyzing the correlation between HPP and depressive symptoms, anxiety sensitivity and suicidal ideation, the researcher found that HPP was highly correlated with anxiety sensitivity, and suicidal ideation was the strengthening factor of this correlation.
Anxiety sensitivity (AS) refers to people's sensitivity to the fear of physical feelings that can bring anxiety based on the belief that it will have harmful consequences. We know that the so-called anxiety disorder, including obsessive-compulsive disorder (or thinking), is simply that people's thinking consciousness is taken over and controlled by some unnecessary worries. In an idiom, it is alarmist, and in popular terms, it is "nothing is difficult in the world, I am afraid that there is a will."
Specific to the HPP phenomenon, people with high anxiety sensitivity, that is, those who "like" alarmism, experience HPP more often. On the other hand, it is generally believed that suicide is mainly the result of impulse, which is "sudden" in western parlance. At the same time, people have the desire to return to nature or commit suicide in their bones. Therefore, people think that HPP may be a psychological phenomenon that promotes suicide.
However, the results show that HPP is very common in people with or without suicidal thoughts, which indicates that HPP may be a risk factor for suicide.
So, why do people have the impulse of HPP? What is the biological significance?
Unscramble the phenomenon of height
This empirical study found that more than three quarters of people who had suicidal thoughts in their lifetime reported having experienced HPP, while more than 50% of people who had never had suicidal thoughts in their lifetime reported having experienced HPP at least once. Such a high proportion of HPP in the crowd breaks a common suicide misunderstanding based on Freudian psychoanalysis-if you imagine your own death, it is because you have a desire to die in your bones.
So, how to interpret this phenomenon?
Researchers believe that a more reasonable explanation is related to the neural circuit of fear and punishment in human brain: survival is the most basic instinct of human beings, and life is fragile, and many things and factors may threaten human life at any time, so people are afraid of these dangerous factors to warn themselves and stay away from these dangers. At the same time, it will be accompanied by various negative emotional experiences. This fear punishment system is currently known to involve caudate nucleus and amygdala.
This system involves several sensory systems, belongs to the instinctive reaction evolved by human beings, has quick thinking and is not controlled by cerebral cortex consciousness. On the contrary, the conscious response dominated by cerebral cortex, because it needs to accept afferent nerve signals, can finally make a "rational" judgment and response after analysis and synthesis. Not only is the reaction relatively slow, but it is also restricted by the ability of learning, experience and self-reaction, so the conscious reaction obviously lags behind the instinctive reaction.
Under normal circumstances, these two systems can coordinate and control human behavior. But in some cases, especially when people are in a high-risk state, people are first controlled by instinctive reactions, and it will take some time to correctly understand the situation and make rational judgments. Personal perception and judgment system, a little slower, will lead to the warning of safety signals (in terms of HPP phenomenon, "Climb so high, you will die if you fall") and misjudge it as "death impulse" ("Climb so high, you will die")-thus, HPP phenomenon has emerged.
For people with anxiety, high sensitivity, suicidal tendency or other negative emotional reactions such as depression, their high sensitivity is more likely to produce this kind of cognitive misjudgment, and it is easier to produce and experience HPP.
Let's imagine the following scenario: imagine a person with high anxiety sensitivity, leaning on the balcony of a tall building, or overlooking from the top of a Gao Qiao or a building. At this time, the visual information about the object below is "deformed" and is not in harmony with other sensory system information of the body. Just like the mechanism of motion sickness and seasickness, it can induce physical reactions similar to motion sickness, including dizziness, nausea and vomiting, sweating, palpitation and other symptoms (this is also the fear of motion sickness). In addition, experience told him that he would die if he fell from such a high place, which caused great fear to warn him of the danger and warned him to stay away quickly.
However, in fact, until your reason tells you that it is safe to fall through balcony protective equipment or solid glass windows, or there is still a certain distance from the edge, the physical reaction has already formed.
Simply put, as the title of the paper published by the researchers said, the impulse of HPP phenomenon is actually strengthening the instinct of human survival (an impulse to jump confirms the urgency of survival).