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 == This article fails to discuss the Wendigo in Psychiatry == 

 The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry has articles which discuss the Culture Bound Syndrome, Wendigo Psychosis. There have been court cases where ""insanity"" or the belief that one was the Wendigo has been used as a defense. Current research has revealed stories, from living Native Americans, of people who were effected by the dissociative break and began to believe they were either becoming the Wendigo or were being chased by a Wendigo. One account reports an execution of a tribal member who exhibited symptoms of psychosis. 

 Mental events have happened on scientific expeditions that copied the conditions, which caused the episodes of Wendigo Psychosis. The most important of these was the Belgian Polar Expedition of 1898. Eighteen normal sailors and scientists began to go insane when the Belgica became frozen in polar ice, (""Through the First Antarctic Night,"" Cook) 

 Those crewmembers did not have a cultural belief in the bogeyman, Windigo. Instead they exhibited extreme depression, one man became a deaf mute, one hid in small remote spaces to sleep fearing the others were plotting to kill him, psychotic paranoia, another died from fear, heart attack.   

 It all stopped when the ship was hacked from the pack ice and began the trip home.  

  
 L K Tucker  

 http://visionandpsychosis.net/Culture_Bound_Syndromes.htm 

 http://visionandpsychosis.net/Chaco_Canyon.htm 

 http://visionandpsychosis.net/Astronauts_Insanity.htm"