✨
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
2001
Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms Following Near-Death Experiences
📄 Original study ↗ Greyson, Bruce • 2001 Modern Era • nde
📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
People who survive a brush with death sometimes report vivid near-death experiences (NDEs) — tunnels of light, life reviews, deep peace. But do those powerful memories haunt them like PTSD flashbacks? This study compared 148 NDErs with 46 people who came equally close to dying without the experience. NDErs did show more intrusive memories — the experience kept replaying — but they did not avoid thinking about it the way trauma survivors typically do. Their distress scores fell well below clinical PTSD levels. The fascinating takeaway: NDEs imprint on memory through positive intensity, not fear, arguing against dismissing them as pathological dissociation and supporting the view they are genuinely transformative.
Links
Related Papers
Cites
Same Research Program
- Incidence and Correlates of Near-Death Experiences in a Cardiac Care Unit — Greyson, Bruce (2003)
- Consistency of Near-Death Experience Accounts over Two Decades: Are Reports Embellished over Time? — Greyson, Bruce (2007)
- Which Near-Death Experience Features Are Associated with Reduced Fear of Death? — Pehlivanova, Marieta (2022)
- Near-Death Experiences with Reports of Meeting Deceased People — Kelly, Emily Williams (2001)
Companion
- Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands — van Lommel, Pim (2001)
- A systematic analysis of distressing near-death experience accounts — Cassol, Helena (2019)
- The Near-Death Experience Content (NDE-C) scale: Development and psychometric validation — Martial, Charlotte (2020)
- Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision — Ring, Kenneth (1997)
Also by these authors
Epistemological Implications of Near-Death Experiences and Other Non-Ordinary Mental Expressions: Moving Beyond the Concept of Altered State of Consciousness
Facco, Enrico • 2015
AWARE--AWAreness during REsuscitation--A prospective study
Parnia, Sam • 2014
Terminal lucidity: A review and a case collection
Nahm, Michael • 2012
More in Nde
The Central Clinical Relevance of Near-Death Experiences in Acute Care Contexts
Michael, Pascal • 2025
Explanation of Near-Death Experiences: A Systematic Analysis of Case Reports and Qualitative Research
Hashemi, Amirhossein • 2023
Neuro-Functional Modeling of Near-Death Experiences in Contexts of Altered States of Consciousness
Romand, Raymond • 2023
AWAreness during REsuscitation - II: A Multi-Center Study of Consciousness and Awareness in Cardiac Arrest
Parnia, Sam • 2023
Advancing the Evidence for Survival of Consciousness
Delorme, Arnaud • 2021
📋 Cite this paper
APA
Greyson, Bruce (2001). Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms Following Near-Death Experiences. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1037/0002-9432.71.3.368
BibTeX
@article{greyson_2001_ptsd,
title = {Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms Following Near-Death Experiences},
author = {Greyson, Bruce},
year = {2001},
journal = {American Journal of Orthopsychiatry},
doi = {10.1037/0002-9432.71.3.368},
}