It’s not enough to be living in this angst-filled 21st
Century than someone else has to come out and give us yet another reason to
look down upon ourselves. It’s really no wonder that the suicide rate is so
high today, and the proportion of people taking: Prozac, Paxil, Celexa, Zoloft, or Cymbalta is
reaching a ridiculous frequency. With all that in the background, you would
think that the citizens in United States don’t need another reason to feel bad
about themselves, but nooooooooooooo.
It seems that Psychiatry Today has uncovered a very profound
truth (well, it is psychiatry after all) that indicates shorter people may feel
inferior to others who are taller. Hold the presses! This is astonishing news.
From the people who brought you the Napoleon complex comes this staggering,
mind-blowing, study: people who had
their height “virtually lowered” felt inferior and mistrustful.
Really now.
That’s right up there with the advertisements for class
action lawsuits that say, “If you experienced any of these symptoms: runny nose, cold, sore throat, or death; you
may be eligible for compensation.”
So it seems a group of British researchers studied a group
of 60 adult women who used a virtual reality simulation to take rides on the
London Underground subway, also known as The Tube. For study purposes, their
height was not altered on their first trip. On their second trip, however, the
researchers took them down nearly 10 inches.
Surprisingly enough, the participants commented on their
second ride experience. They reported an increase in negative feelings, such as
incompetence, inferiority, and feeling as if they were not liked. They also reported increased paranoia toward
other virtual “passengers” on the train. Most of the participants, however, did
not realize their height had been lowered for the second simulation—which
apparently led these junior Sigmund Freuds to believe that a solid dosing of
Zoloft was needed—much the same as they do in today’s society.
For the most part, according to the researchers, the people
behaved the same in the virtual environment as they do in a real subway—oh
wonder of wonders. Interestingly enough, the researchers also disclosed that
the women who participated in the study “were prone to having mistrustful
thoughts.”
How on earth can you make any kind of conclusions from that data
set?
They go on to say that the study provides insight into
paranoia. According to the lead researcher, Daniel Freeman, a professor at the
University of Oxford, the study shows “that people’s excessive mistrust of
others directly builds upon their own negative feelings about themselves.”
Obviously psychiatry is an inexact science, if it is a
science indeed. The battlefield is strewn with theories about this, that, and
the other. Freud hammered away about the Id, the Ego, and the Alter Ego, and
Carl Jung had his archetypes. But in the end it’s really all theory. It doesn’t
take some kind of study to come up with a “truth” that is plain as the nose on
your face.
Ultimately, someone paid for this study. Who, I don’t really
know, but I am sure that at least one or two people have been making a living
on this project through some obscure funding source. And in the end it’s not
too far a reach from the idea of studying bovine emanations to see how they
might affect the atmosphere. No doubt, the number of cows that dot the
countryside from sea to shining sea have at least as much to do with
contaminating the air as the cars that travel the Interstate highways do.
For as long as I remember people have talked about the
Napoleon Complex, the idea that being short in some way affects the psyche’ and
can create ego maniacs who do crazy things to compensate for being short.
Napoleon stood five-foot six-inches tall. Not tall by today’s standard, but
certainly not too short. While that may seem short today, by the standards of
1799 he was actually two inches taller than the five-foot four-inch average
height for European men at the time. So even that psychiatric invention
concerning Napoleon would appear to be wrong, and I suspect that there is no
exact science when it comes to psychiatry and the bulk of it resides with an
individual’s perception. In other words,
believe what you want. For me, I believe this study was a waste of time and money.
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