HEALTH
CLIMBING TO THE “DEATH ZONE” is perilous. Scaling mountains to heights where planes fly and there’s little oxygen can trigger extreme responses. There is no shortage of personal accounts of mountain climbers, alone at high altitudes, losing their grip on reality. One man who climbed Mount Everest recounts how, thousands of feet up, a climber named “Jimmy” appeared out of the darkness, said “hello” and climbed behind him before disappearing. Now, doctors are taking a closer look at such stories.
A team led by Dr. Katharina Hüfner, composed of researchers from Eurac Research and the Medical University of Innsbruck, studied the accounts of climbers at altitudes above 2 miles to understand what was happening to them. According to the researchers, they may be experiencing psychosis. The results were published in Psychological Medicine in early December. Looking over 83 accounts by climbers, the researchers found 41 who described psychosis, when a grip on reality is lost. They found a smaller number who described symptoms of psychosis and no other illness. For the latter, the episodes mostly lasted several hours, although some went on for several days. These climbers had trouble seeing, hearing and speaking and hallucinated both sights and sounds.