Stress, paranormal beliefs, and my sister

The more stressed you are, the more likely you are to have paranormal beliefs. I have personal experience.

This is an intensely personal piece. And it drops on a Thursday — the day where full access is reserved for paid subscribers only. If a paid subscription is honestly a financial hardship for you, email me at brian@briandunning.com and I will gift you a few months’ subscription. But if it’s not a hardship, please consider accepting a paid subscription:

This is me and my sister Dr. Elisabeth McClellan, circa 2005. She left us in 2007, aged 32.

Hey everyone.

It’s not every day I post an article headlined with a picture of my late sister Elisabeth and I. I am viciously protective of her. She passed in 2007 from an undiagnosed condition at the age of 32. It was — as luck would have it — on the eve of her doctoral graduation ceremony. She had earned a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. The degree was (obviously) awarded regardless, though posthumously. Such was her impact on her program, her fellow grad students, the faculty, and St. George’s University at large, that they did this:

They named a building after her. (That’s me in the middle, and our mom Tay McClellan to your right of me, and her father [and my dad] Pat McClellan to your right of her, and a very special person Dr. Heather Douglas to your left of me.) You want to throw shade on my sister, you’re going to have to get through me; plus the entire population of the island nation of Grenada. They loved her there — just as I still do.

All of this funnels into the topic of today’s post: a really fascinating paper published in PLOS One in November 2024 titled Re-evaluation of the relationship between paranormal belief and perceived stress using statistical modelling. Yeah, it’s a mouthful. But a criminally condensed abstract of it could be:

People who believe in traditional paranormal beliefs (uncontrollable external forces) are more likely to have higher stress levels.

Now that sounds kind of predictable. Imagine some person who suffers stress after having lost a loved one, and one can easily conclude that they might be more susceptible to ideas of life after death. They need to be.

And this is where this story gets very personal.