Susto: Loss of Soul Through Terrible Fright

Susto is a disorder you might get in Central or South America, resulting from your soul having left your body as a result of a severe fright. (A more severe form of susto is called espanto, and considered potentially fatal.)

Symptoms of susto include: nervousness, insomnia, despondency, lack of attention to your appearance, listlessness, fear of the event happening again, and stomach upsets. Susto clearly has much in common with PTSD, including the fact that sometimes it doesn't set in until months or years after the event that caused it. See the list of symptoms listed by one curandera, and you will note that many of them correspond to those of PTSD.

But the notion of soul loss captures something essential to the experience of great fear--something that is not captured by the notion of PTSD and the neurological explanations that go with that diagnosis. Great fear (and also great loss) do make you feel as though you had lost some essential part of oneself. The lively, life-filled part: your soul.

Susto is treated by local healers in the US using herbal teas, limpias (cleansing rituals) and barridas (sweeping rituals). During the barrida the client recounts the traumatic event, and then receives a healing usually involving having his or her body swept with a crucifix or some other ritual object such as an egg. Usually a series of barridas is necessary to heal a person from susto.

According to Dr. Dennis O'Neil, at Palomar College, California: "Among the Maya Indians of Southern Mexico and Guatemala, [the] ceremony typically involves a lengthy series of ritual actions in the presence of the patient's friends and relatives. It usually begins with prayers to the Catholic saint of the village. Next, a chicken egg and special herbs are passed over the patient's body to absorb some of the illness. Later, the egg may be left where the soul loss occurred, along with gifts to propitiate the supernatural being who has the patient's soul. The patient is then partly stripped and "shocked" by liquor being sprayed from the curandero's mouth. The patient may then be massaged and finally "sweated" on a bed placed over or near a hot stove. Alternatively, the patient may be covered with many blankets to induce profuse sweating."