Medicine: Is a Possum Neurotic?

German-born Psychiatrist Hans Lowenbach of Duke University was puzzled for a moment when a colleague complained that one of his patients was “playing possum.” Turning the colloquialism over in his mind, Dr. Lowenbach asked himself: “What would happen if a possum played patient?” So he started giving the animals a series of psychological tests.

Alarmed by a buzzer or a flash of light, possums played possum for an average of two minutes, six seconds. Then Dr. Lowenbach and Dr. John Andrews Ritchie gave the marsupials standard electric-shock treatments. After ten doses the possums, when alarmed, froze for an average of only eight seconds. Some did not freeze at all, and actually “came out fighting” when a light flashed on them.

Perhaps, Dr. Lowenbach suggested to the Southern Psychiatric Association last week, the trick of “playing dead” may show that the opossum is even more beset than the average psychiatric patient by such traits as “severe anxiety, neurosis, depression, lack of initiative and recession into himself.”