Hi, I am Elle, and this is Quid Pro Quo, your friendly neighborhood forensics psych podcast. One may be the loneliest number, but as we'll see today, two can in fact be as bad as one when you're talking about the darker aspects of psychology. The Quid Pro Quo podcast deals with crime, psychology, and related themes. Listen or discretion is advised.
Whether romantic or companionable, the advantages of being in a close relationship are myriad. Studies have linked relationships of all sorts with increased longevity, better health outcomes during illness, greater resilience from emotional turmoil, and science is coming up with new ones seemingly every day. Companions can inspire us to legendary greatness. Plutarch in his Plobitus tells of the Macedonian 4th century BC defeat of the sacred band of Thebes, an elite fighting force made entirely of paired lovers.
So exemplary was their bravery and devotion that when Philip II of Macedonia, father to Alexander the Great, came upon their bodies heaped upon each other, he is said to have wept and exclaimed, perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything unseemly. And of course any fan of Doctor Who knows the power of companions. We know the companionship and the desire to impress a partner can spur people to greatness, but not everyone has defeating the Daleks or preserving the glory of their ancient Greek city-state foremost in mind. Companionship can be poisonous as well.
The reasons why partnerships go awry are as varied as the devastation they can wreak as a result, but one thing is clear, there is something to the idea that misery loves company. Here in America we like to think of ourselves as individuals as the keeper of our own minds and actions, but when you study actual human behavior, your belief in unblemished personal autonomy might start to go a bit squigy. In fact we are notoriously bad at resisting the influence of people around us. In 1961, Yale professor Stanley Milgram began one of the most famously disheartening social research studies of all time.
Spurred to action by the Nuremberg War crime trials, he wondered what conditions could lead to the widespread everyday compliance to the horrible genocidal acts of the Nazi party. Not the dominating psychology of power-med leaders, but the obedience of everyday citizens, people who consider themselves moral and community-minded. Adult male subjects were recruited from the new Haven, Connecticut area and told they would be participating in a learning experiment with a second recruited subject. They were randomly assigned to be teacher and learner.
The teacher would quiz learner on a word-memory test and wrong answers would be punished with an electric shock administered by the teacher, and these shocks were to increase over time. Simple, right? In reality, all recruited volunteers were assigned to be the shock dispensing teacher and were paired with a fake subject who was actually a disguised member of the experiment. The fake learner was moved to a remote room, and the only feedback the subject received from them after this point was pite-in, scripted audio reactions.
The order of right and wrong answers was predetermined, as were the reactions of the person supposedly being shocked. The pite-in replies were scripted to imply that the shocks quickly became painful and even life-threatening. As the experiment continued, the faked reactions of the person being shocked became more dire, and the scripted reactions to the highest shock levels very clearly implied that the learner was in serious physical danger and possibly unconscious or dying. The only part of the experiment that was unscripted was the subject's reaction to being told that they have to give the shocks.
Subjects who resisted dispensing shocks were given a pre-scripted series of increasingly authoritarian responses encouraging them to continue. If they asked who was responsible for the learner's welfare, the experimenter claimed responsibility without further explanation. The ultimate question was, how far would ostensibly normal people go to comply with instructions which are clearly harmful to another person before they refuse to continue? The shocks started at 70 volts and increased at 15 volt intervals.
At 150 volts, the recorded learner response switched from simple discomfort to clearly expressed distress and concerns for a heart condition. I will include links to some of the original experiment audio and video on the webpage, but responses included phrases like, that's all, get me out of here. And I told you I had a heart trouble, my heart's starting to bother me now. In the original test, all the participants continued to double this level at 300 volts, which was noted on the machine as extreme intensity.
Remember that a large home appliance plug in the US is not even this high at 220 volts. A staggering 65% of participants in the original study continued to the highest level of 450 volts, which was labeled beyond the point of danger, severe shock, with a sinister red triple X. This is by the fact that every shock over 330 volts was met with ominous silence. A very small bit of internet sleuthing indicates that this is not how being electrocuted actually works, but that is really neither here nor there.
As far as these participants knew, they were distributing clearly labeled dangerous shocks to a person in unequivocal physical distress. Though many were deeply upset by the prospect, they still went through with it for no other reason than someone who seemed important took responsibility for it and told them to do it. Milgro's team alone did 18 variations of this test with a total of 636 subjects to see what variables made their subjects more likely to stop or continue giving the shocks. While there are well-documented problems and concerns with the study population and experimental ethics of the original studies, researchers are still doing variations on this theme, and the basic result is reinforced every time.
As recently as 2015, a Polish team published a research paper handily replicating Milgroom's original results. Researcher Tomoszgerzab notes, Upon learning about Milgroom's experiments, a vast majority of people claim that I would never behave in such a manner, half a century after Milgroom's original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual. Time and time again, research results indicate that even among complete strangers we are terrible at resisting even completely unreasonable demands, especially so when they have an error of authority, when we are in close proximity with them, and when there is no other person immediately present to provide a balancing opinion. Now imagine the sheer power of an authoritative figure who is a trusted or beloved compatriot.
Small reflections of this happen all around you. Observe any group of neighborhood kids long enough and you will find the pied piper of the group who leads less bold companion into absurd and often dangerous adventures. Once the follower later, after the power of the double dog dare has waned, the scrapes of scabbed and emotions settled and they can rarely give you a better reason than, I don't know, seems like a good idea at the time. When your ringleader is simply bold and a little reckless and whether dragging you into seems like an exciting adventure, hopefully you get off with a little more than a scrape, some minor property damage to pay back, but sometimes we are not so lucky.
How often have you watched a friend or even observed yourself get a little too close for comfort to someone compelling and dynamic and living a devastatingly unhealthy emotional life. In a perfect world, this relationship would provide needed stability and they would get the help they need and become the best friend slash lover slash ex they can be. But as we are all painfully aware, this world is not perfect. We all like to think that we are strong enough to resist the chaos of a disordered influence telling us we have to do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.
But Mr. Milgram's clicky box says otherwise. The everyday side of this dynamic is the abusive spouse who gaslights their partner into bending over backward to keep things quote unquote happy. Or the depressed friend who finally pushes away the people who most want to help.
Or the hoarding person who has their family convinced it's easier to just go with it. Or the big spending partner who somehow magically diminishes the impact of yet another big purchase. But there is a far end of the spectrum too. This is the Falayadu, man is shared by two or as it's now rather more clinically called shared psychosis.
Under the ICD-10 diagnostic criteria, two people share the same delusion or delusional system and support one another in this belief. They have an unusually close relationship and temporal or contextual evidence exists that indicates the delusion was induced in the passive member by contact with the active partner. The general gist is that one clearly mentally disordered person comes in close contact with another person who would not otherwise be considered disordered in this way. But through the strength of their connection, the delusion somehow sweeps the second person up into the same fantastical chaos.
Identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons were born in Barbados in 1963, but their father Aubrey was a technician in the Royal Air Force and the family soon moved to Wales for his work. The sisters were always tight to the exclusion of others, even as children, and speech delays set them apart from family and peers alike. Actual speech delays grew too shyness and then elective isolation. Through much of their childhood, their parents seemed strangely permissive of this behavior, considering them merely shy.
Many school officials taught them completely mute well into school age, even though when unaware of observation, it seemed the girls could in fact speak just fine. By their teens June and Jennifer would only really effectively communicate to each other, and often would only do so in private. They cultivated a sped up, stylized form of English and a series of very unsettling, synchronized body posturing involving eerie, mirrored movements and extended freezing into place. Many thought that June was more responsive to interaction and could possibly be convinced to socialize in the right situation, but it was clear that any attempts to break June out of her shell were being squashed mercilessly by Jennifer.
In the words of their speech therapist, there was a sort of game going on. I could see June dying to tell me things. Then something would happen. Jennifer was stopping June.
I watched and could barely detect the slightest eye movement, but I knew she was stopping June. It was strange, like extra sensory perception. She sat there with an expressionless gaze, but I felt her power. She made all the decisions.
The thought entered by mind that June was possessed by her twin. Severe often racially motivated bullying, an unsettled military family childhood, and a staggering number of dropped balls by people that should have done educational intervention, led to increasing withdrawal from others to the point that their schooling was all but useless. It seemed the closer they clung to each other, the more friction there was between them, and they began to have violent, almost murderous fights. Concerned psychologists urged a complete separation in their early teens, and they were sent to separate boarding schools as a last ditch attempt to force them to interact with others.
Paradoxically, they both became in turns suicidal and nearly comatose, and this experiment was quickly abandoned. The girls entered into a pact to become nearly completely selectively mute to anyone but each other, and all but ported themselves into a room in their parents' home. They did, however, discover writing, and a deep obsession with American culture, devouring all of the television, books, and magazines they could get their hands on. They kept parallel diaries, and their extensive writings would pack so tightly onto pages they would appear black with text.
The handwriting is so tiny that it is said to take hours to read and transcribe a single page. They each self-published several novels about American teens living fast lives, mailing out completed manuscripts in secret, past family members they wouldn't even speak to, and they became fixated on the idea of achieving fame through these novels. It's clear they did have some outside interaction as they befriended and even got romantically involved with some American boys in the neighborhood. These boys were not considered a good influence, and were apparently all too eager to play into the girls' fantasy of the fast American life, plying them with drugs and alcohol.
When the boys moved away, things seemed to take a term for the worse, if you can believe it. After the loss of their American boys, and the fizzling of their American literature career, they spiraled into anger and depression and turned to crime to achieve their infamy. They burgled, broke into educational facilities, and called to taunt police from inside. They lit fires and one blaze ended up injuring a firefighter.
After a short spree they were jailed in 1982, no one expected the mute shut insisters to have caused all of this chaos until they were caught red-handed trespassing in a public building. Their crime spree was fairly prosaic, but their behavior was so unsettling that rather than receiving set criminal sentences, they were remanded to open-ended custody in a mental health facility. The judge called them psychopathic, and no one put up much of an argument, certainly not the teens themselves. No facility was willing to take them but broad more, and alter a high-security psychiatric hospital.
These admittedly weird, but primarily self-destructive delinquents were to be locked up with the literal worst of the worst of criminally insane Great Britain. While incarcerated, they would take turns eating, one binging while the other starved, and then switching the next day. They could be found locked into the same poses, even when separated with an entire building between them. Most Marjorie Wallace heard their story and began regular visits which would eventually span their entire incarceration, managing to eventually pull them out of their selective mutism by discussing their writings.
She says, somewhere between their furious perceptions, reality lay exhausted, and so was I laying exhausted between their furious perceptions. It was like living through a horror movie. But she stuck with them, in a phone interview with Oliver Sacks. Yes, that Oliver Sacks.
She said, the girls had an uncanny jarring effect on most people who encountered them, somehow upsetting them down to their depths. But because I had read their writings, I saw a sweetness and naive innocence in them that the world would not believe they had. Though they remained devoted to each other, the relationship was marked by turmoil. They brawled regularly, and eventually had to be completely separated at Broadmore.
June wrote, nobody suffers the way I do, not with a sister. With a husband, yes, with a wife, yes, with a child, yes. But this sister of mine, a dark shadow robbing me of sunlight, is my one and only torment. Jennifer's own writings echo this chaos.
We have become fatal enemies in each other's eyes. We feel the irritating deadly rays come out of our bodies, stinging each other's skin. I say to myself, can I get rid of my own shadow? Impossible or not possible?
Without my shadow would I die? Without my shadow would I gain life? Be free or left to die? Before Marjorie, they lacked any effective advocate.
This of course, including themselves. Eventually the sisters began campaigning for their freedom, complaining that they remained locked up for the crime of being silent and even resorted to writing the Queen when petitions for freedom within the facility did not work. After 14 years in Broadmore, they were finally released to a lower security clinic. Shortly before their transfer, Sister Jennifer revealed to journalist Marjorie that they had made a pact that one sister would have to die so that the other could live a normal life.
Marjorie, I'm going to die. We've decided. Marjorie alerted the hospital, thinking the twins were perhaps in risk of suicide, but they showed no warning signs other than this cryptic conversation. Shoe to her word, as the twins walked through the gate, Jennifer slumped against June and fell to the ground in a coma.
She died of a mysterious heart ailment that very night, and an autopsy showed only an enlargement of the tissues around her heart and no toxicological or other clear biological reason. It is generally accepted that Jennifer simply willed herself to die. June was released from the lower security clinic a year later and describes her life since the death of her sister is sad, but also liberated. She lives a quiet, now fairly unremarkable life and is no longer in care.
Marjorie Wallace has written a book about her experience with the twins, called The Silent Twins, and their story has been told in documentary, film dramatization, and even a play. For a further utterly mystifying and fascinating example of the power of Falyadu among twins in Britain, I know, could I get more specific? Check out episode 17 of Case File Podcast or episode 11 of Bone Palace Ballet Podcast covering Ursula and Sabina Erikson. In Sisters From Sweden, who attempted to fulfill a sudden, inexplicable death wish, repeatedly running into traffic on the M6 roadway near Keel, England.
And that's where their story starts. This bizarrely specific cross-section aside, identical twins are rare enough. Those with a rare mental disorder so strong as to carry them to someone's untimely death, well that's obviously even more rare. These stories stand out because they are so unimaginable, but there's another flavor of poisonous companionship, which I think will be considerably more familiar on a number of levels.
Oscar-nominated Saturday Night Live alum Randy Quaid and his wife, film director, and model Evie Quaid, went through an extended legal battle peeking around 2010, attempting to shake theft and trespassing charges and gain legal refuge in Canada. When challenged about their need for asylum, they claimed they were running in fear of an alleged Hollywood Illuminati group called the Star Waggers, who they accused of having killed David Carradine, Chris Penn, and Heath Ledger, and having set up the legal troubles for themselves, actor Robert Blake, and Michael Jackson. Though their issues started with what seemed like some typical, wild Hollywood lifestyle financial problems, the paranoid framework of their claims and increasingly disordered behavior have many convinced that their actions are fueled and shaped by Evie's mental illness rather than some calculated fraud. Usual disclaimer here, I do not have access to the Quaid's family mental health records, much less their detailed drug abuse history, and I am not privy to any shadowy Illuminati group files.
I am not diagnosing the Quaids, but if you want a painstakingly paparazzi, YouTube, and criminal court documented example of what shared psychosis looks like, well, you can certainly do worse. Nancy Jo Sails interviewed the couple for a linked Vanity Fair article. Evie's quotes are scattered and paranoid. She describes elaborate shadow conspiracies involving entire faked people.
Stolen nail, broken acting contracts, forged house deeds, and mob hitmen disguised as gardeners. They're hunting us, Evie said, it's really happening. They've got us in a spiral. Don't let up on them.
Drag them off the road, starve them to death, pull their money out of their bank accounts. Whereas Randy's quotes in this article at least are a bit odd, but not floridly, and are focused on Evie, their relationship, and their existence as a pair. He says, my accountant, he sent me a letter behind Evie's back. He said, your wife is spending so much money, she's going to drag you into the poor house.
They were trying to separate us, divide us, and it really affected me. Like, I started looking at Evie sideways like this. Yeah, Evie was going into Hermes, she was going into all these stores, Chanel, the whole deal. But now I know if you total up all the bills, they're just a little fraction of what I was capable of paying for.
I was making enough money for me to comfortably support Evie and her shopping. They wanted to separate us, said Quaid, because Evie is very intuitive and very smart. She's the smartest person I know. You can call her crazy, you can call her whatever you want, but she is my lifeline.
And if she wasn't with me, I don't know where I'd be. Interviewed friends and colleagues describe a clear downward spiral after their whirlwind marriage, from stable life to disorder. And they refer to her influence as a spell or power over him. Frankly, I strongly suspect that this flavor of shared psychosis is rather more common than that textbooks would have us believe, for the simple fact that paranoid and delusional behavior often leads to chaotic home lives, self-medication, and increased chances of being a victim of violence.
If you're not famous, or your interaction with the other half of your duo remains unobserved clinically, or you simply don't have anyone around who cares enough to notice what's going on, how exactly do you get diagnosed with shared psychosis? We know about these people because they are incredibly famous. We have made a movie about this subject as well as maintaining a significant presence on YouTube. We know about the Gibson twins because there was extensive documentation of their symptoms by their schools throughout their young lives.
We know that Erickson twins because of a completely chance interaction with a film crew. Seriously, that story is unbelievable and worth your time if you're not familiar with it. But how many adult couples simply drift away from a solid support system and quietly spiral into extreme debt, homelessness, and lethal life circumstances such as addiction without anyone knowing their names, much less their minds? If two trees fall in the woods, do they make any more of a sound?
If you want to weigh in on Companionship Gone, or if you have other questions about true crime and forensics psych, seek me out at Quid Pro QuoCast on Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, Gmail, at the.com, and wherever fine, Internets are sold. I'm currently the most active on Twitter. Oh, and rest assured, the subject of not-so-dynamic duos is far from exhausted. On a couple of more administrative notes, starting, well, today, if you're listening on May 15, 2017, I will be participating in a campaign called Two Pods a Day.
It aims to introduce podcast listeners to two independent podcasts every day for 30 days. We hope to give visibility to some of the great indie podcasts that you probably haven't heard of. Two Pods a Day encourages you to listen more, listen independent. Find more shows like mine by following at Two Pods a Day on Twitter and Facebook, or just searching the hashtag Two Pods a Day.
I have added a brand spanking new pledge level on Patreon, which gets you stickers. I'd like to thank my most recent patrons, Mike, at the Please and Terrorist podcast, and Albert, who has actually helped me a lot with the artwork for this podcast. I'd also like to thank my newest five-star iTunes reviewer, Goodpony, and the lovely people of podcasts we listen to on Facebook for helping to get the word out there. May's Murder of the Month book pick is Don't Tell a Soul by M.
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