Well, since I was asked nicely, I will comment . . . I hadn’t planned on doing so as these stories come and go and usually are journalistic hyperbole and exaggeration or misstatement of what actually happens.

• Hypnotist show shut down after girl hospitalized
• Hypnotist’s show in Logan puts too many in a trance
• Hypnotist act sends Logan girl to hospital

Three very different headlines, all of them sensationalist, each with details slightly different.

The first story notes that the show was shut down by school officials after the girl was hospitalized while the last says it is the hypnotist who sends her to the hospital.

However, none of the stories are actually even clear that this girl was in the show. We do learn in at least one story that she was hyperventilating and in a panic and that is why she was hospitalized, not because of any hypnotic suggestion. It is not clear if she was hyperventilating because of the show or if it is completely unrelated but happened during the show.

Some very rare rew folks do experience spontaneous abreactions when entering hypnosis and any competent hypnotist knows exactly how to handle it – I teach my students the easy and safe techniques to handle any such situation. These are folks who may have hidden emotional issues that need expressing (in therapy, such events are wonderful as they lead to powerful healing, in entertainment they are inappropriate and easy to set aside). It is extremely unlikely you would have a group of folks undergoing such spontaneous abreactions (if this were really the case here, then someone needs to be looking into the dynamics of that school for some possible nastiness . . . but it is unlikely). Besides, it is more unlikely that the girls in the audience who were uncomfortable were reacting to the panic around the hospitalized girl’s emergency rather than experiencing genuine abreactions. They were likely feeding off the negative emotional energies around them rather than having any genuine crisis of their own.

Some of the news reports imply that the hypnotist had somehow trapped a number of audience members in hypnosis and didn’t know how to get them out. Therre is a technical term for this . . . bullshit. Note that at least one piece does say that a few girls were having difficulty emerging from trance . . . that is not the same as trap or panic. Some folks do feel a bit loopy after hypnosis and it’s easy to guide them out fully. Once in awhile, a hypnotist might experience someone who does not emerge when told to . . . this is NEVER a negative experience, they like the feeling of being relaxed and so ignore the suggestion to emerge. I also teach folks how to deal with these folks as well.

It is fundamentally impossible to become stuck in hypnosis, in much the same way you can’t get stuck in a daydream. Newspapers or media that report otherwise are sensationalizing in order to sell copy or they’re just plain wrong.

Something wrong happened at that show and it may have had something to do with the hypnotist (a number of critics of this story suspect the veracity of the piece as the hypnotist is never actually named and a number of stories have a single source who was not even actually present during the events – the school officials did say everything was fine and the folks who were actually present have much less sensationalist takes than the stories with higher degrees of separation from the actual sources . . . wire reading reporters re-writing wire copy and adding hyperbole and assumption in order to spice up the copy).

If the events were really as they are reported in the more sensatonalist versions of the story, I would be quite surprised indeed that such a thing would happen to an experienced hypnotist (as the fellow here is described). In order for that many people to go into spontaneous negative experiences, he would have to be monumentally incompetent (which his background presupposes he is not) or there’s some really eveil trauma-inducing circumstances hiddend within the bowells of the High School at Logan, Utah, something dark and scary and very pervasive to affect so many in such a deep core-personality shaking way to cause them to all spontaneously erupt into abreactions in that way. Or, you might have a bunch of hysteric girls susceptible to one another’s empathic responses (in much the way that certain psychosomatic ailments travel among teen populations while skipping adults).

In short, while these stories are interesting, the inherent inconsistencies and omissions lead me to be very very skeptical. My own experience and research into this are – and I am VERY VERY VERY well read on these issues – leads me to be very very very very suspicious that the whole story has not been told and that actually events are very likely to have been much more benign than they are being presented in the local Utah press and elsewhere that picks up on the story without proper fact checking.

Now . . . of course, I have my biases as well but at least my biases are based upon actual study and practice and experience of the subject . . . and . . . naturally . . . my shows this weekend are completely safe and will be delightfully fun.

All the best,
Brian