Distressing NDEs in six studies: how common they are and what is known about them

Step 1

Before 1992 · The question

For years, hardly anyone asked about frightening NDEs

The first books on NDEs, in the 1970s, talked almost only about peace, light, and kind beings. In 1984, the psychologist Kenneth Ring wrote that unpleasant NDEs were at most one in a hundred. A Gallup poll in the United States gave a similar figure.

Other researchers found many more. In 1979, the psychologist Charles Garfield interviewed 36 people a few days after they had come close to death. Eight described nightmarish visions. In 1981, a study in the northwestern United States found 11 partly negative experiences out of 55.

The figures did not match, and nobody was quite sure what to count as a distressing NDE.

Two researchers decided to start by describing them.

Step 2

1992 · Greyson and Bush · As the study tells it

From 50 accounts, Greyson and Bush describe three types of distressing NDE

The psychiatrist Bruce Greyson had created the scale used to measure NDEs. In 1992, he and the researcher Nancy Evans Bush published the first study devoted to these experiences. Over ten years, about 30 people had written to them on their own to tell them about a terrifying NDE. The two then placed a notice in the newsletter of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. In all, they gathered 50 accounts.

From these accounts they described three types:

• The inverse NDE. It has the same features as a pleasant NDE, such as leaving the body, a tunnel, or a light, but the person goes through it in terror. Often what frightens them is losing control. Some become calm when the person stops resisting.
• The void. The person feels they are ceasing to exist, or that they are alone forever in an endless nothingness. Sometimes they feel they are being told that their life was never real. According to the authors, most of these happened to women giving birth under anesthesia.
• The hellish NDE. The person sees dark landscapes and frightening beings, or falls down a pit. According to the authors, these were the least common among their accounts.

This study gives no percentage. The 50 accounts were gathered precisely because they were distressing, so they cannot show how many NDEs are distressing. Nor do they say how many accounts there are of each type.

That same year, another researcher gave a figure based on her interviews.

Step 3

1992 · Atwater · As she tells it

Atwater counts 105 distressing cases among more than 700 people she interviewed

Phyllis Atwater is an American researcher who had been interviewing people with an NDE since 1978. She had had three herself, all three pleasant. In 1992, she wrote an opinion piece in the journal of NDE studies.

In it she says that, among more than 700 people she had asked, 105 had a distressing experience. That is about 15 out of 100. She does not explain how she chose these people or what she counted as distressing, because it is not a study with a method.

Atwater noticed other things. None of the children she interviewed described anything terrifying. Nobody described fire to her. They described cold. And the same scene could be joyful for one person and horrible for another. She also suggested that hellish NDEs happen mostly to people who carry guilt or expect punishment. She gave no data to back this up.

Seventeen years later, Nancy Evans Bush brought together all the published figures.

Step 4

2009 · Bush · As her review tells it

Bush adds up thirty years of studies and concludes they may be between 15 and 19 out of 100

In 2009, Nancy Evans Bush wrote the chapter on distressing NDEs in the standard reference book on NDEs, the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences. She went over the studies published since 1975.

She found 9 studies, with 459 people, in which nobody described a distressing NDE. And another 12 studies, with 1,369 people, in which 315 did. In those 12 studies, that is 23 out of 100. She does not say which studies they are, or how many cases each one contributes.

These studies were done in very different ways. Some asked all the patients in a hospital, and others collected accounts from people who wrote in on their own. Some were looking specifically for distressing experiences.

Her final conclusion is more cautious than that 23 out of 100. She writes that distressing NDEs are more common than was believed, and that they may be in the “mid- to high teens” out of 100. That means between 15 and 19. In the Psi Encyclopedia, an online encyclopedia, she does the calculation with all 21 studies together. These are the 9 with no distressing NDEs and the 12 with some, and she gets 17 out of 100. She also writes that there is no evidence that they are a punishment for having done something wrong.

The studies that followed looked at more specific groups of people.

Step 5

2015 · Liège · As the study tells it

With an injury at the base of the brain, NDEs bring much less peace

Locked-in syndrome is when a person is conscious but cannot move or speak. They can only move their eyes. It is caused by an injury to the brainstem, the lower part of the brain that connects it to the spinal cord.

In 2015, the neuropsychologist Vanessa Charland-Verville and her team at the University of Liège, in Belgium, looked for people with this syndrome. They asked 14 who remembered something from their coma. Eight described an NDE. The team compared them with 23 people who had an NDE after a coma caused by an injury to another part of the brain.

Peace was felt by 3 of the 8 people with locked-in syndrome, and by 22 of the 23 in the other group. It was the only clear difference. On average, they described their NDE about 19 years after having it.

The authors give two possible explanations and do not choose between them. One is that the injury changes how the brain areas that control emotions work. The other is that waking up trapped in a body that does not move would take the peace away from anyone.

This study did not measure fear. The scale they used only asks about pleasant features, so it shows less peace, not more distress.

Four years later, the same Liège group compared how distressing NDEs are remembered.

Step 6

2019 · Liège · As the study tells it

Among 123 people who had been in a coma, 17 describe a distressing NDE

In 2019, the neuropsychologist Helena Cassol and the Liège group reviewed the accounts they had received since 2010. They used only those from people who had been in a coma for more than an hour and admitted to the ICU. Their experience also had to reach the minimum score on Greyson’s scale to count as an NDE. In all, 123 people met these conditions.

To find out whether an NDE was distressing, they asked how the person’s emotions felt at the time, from very negative to very positive. They were negative in 17 of the 123. That is about 14 out of 100. Eight were inverse NDEs, 8 were hellish, and only 1 was a void. Unlike in Greyson and Bush’s accounts, the rarest type was the void.

People remembered distressing NDEs with the same detail and the same clarity as pleasant ones. Distressing and pleasant NDEs had almost the same features, except for peace and joy.

There was one more difference. Four of the 17 people with a distressing NDE had it after a suicide attempt. Among the 106 with a pleasant NDE, only one did. The authors suggest that what the person was feeling beforehand might influence how they experience it.

The authors warn that these people came forward on their own, so the figure may not apply to everyone.

The largest study was published by Bruce Greyson in 2023.

Step 7

2023 · Virginia · As the study tells it

In 546 Virginia accounts, 58 are distressing, and the only thing that stands out is resisting

In 2023, Bruce Greyson published an overview of distressing NDEs with new data from the University of Virginia’s collection. It holds 546 accounts that people sent in on their own. Of these, 437 were pleasant, 51 neutral, and 58 distressing. That is about 11 out of 100.

Greyson looked at whether distressing NDEs were linked to sex, age, childhood, or cause. He also looked at religion, mood, and suicide attempts. He found no clear link with any of these.

The only thing that stood out was the person’s attitude just before the experience. Among those who wanted to let go, 6 out of 100 were distressing. Among those who were fighting to stay in control, 17 out of 100 were.

Greyson also points out that the scales for measuring NDEs were designed with pleasant ones in mind. As a result, some distressing NDEs do not score high enough to count as NDEs.

That leaves the question we started with: how many NDEs are distressing? Let’s look at what is known and what isn’t.