By Alka Agrawal, PhD

      NEW YORK, Feb 04 (Reuters Health) -- "Near-death experiences," reports from cardiac arrest survivors of being out-of-body or encountering heavenly beings while clinically dead, continue to be studied and debated among experts. In Saturday's issue of The Lancet, a US psychiatrist suggests that such experiences may be a response to stress in individuals who typically dissociate their thoughts and feelings from stressful events.

      But near-death experience is not a sign of psychiatric disease, he concludes.

      "Dissociation is basically narrowing your focus so much so that you block other parts of your experience out of your mind," researcher Dr. Bruce Greyson, a professor of psychiatry with the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville told Reuters Health. "This can be very helpful, for example, when you're able to ignore pain and keep doing something in spite of the pain."

      "The near-death experience itself has some of the earmarks of dissociation," he added. People reporting near-death experiences often describe intense feelings of peace and joy, and paranormal elements such as leaving the body and seeing dead relatives. Greyson estimates that between 9% and 18% of people who have come close to death have had a near-death experience.

      Greyson sent questionnaires to patients who had contacted him to share "accounts of their close brushes with death." He analyzed the responses of 134 of these individuals to two separate questionnaires that measured the "depth" of their near-death experiences and dissociative symptoms. Of the 134 individuals, 96 had reported having a near-death experience and the remainder had not.

      "People who have near-death experiences do report more dissociation than other folks, but its always of the benign, everyday kind," Greyson said in the interview. "They don't tend to report the pathological type."

      Examples of normal types of dissociation include daydreaming, or getting lost in a book or movie. Pathological dissociative disorders occur when people block out whole sections of their lives. Multiple personalities are one example of pathological dissociation, he explained.

      In his report, Greyson concludes that the "pattern of dissociative symptoms reported by people who have had near-death experiences is consistent with a nonpathological dissociative response to stress, and not with a psychiatric disorder."

      "This seems like it's a normal reaction to trauma. It's not a sign of mental illness, it's not an indication that these people are going to have any other types of problems," he added.