New Research Claims Car Crashes Can be Good For You

A new book has just been published by academic Eric Wilson at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, USA which claims that ‘rubbernecking’ at the scene of car accidents can be good for your health.  The philosophy he espouses proposes that seeing the suffering and even death of others is positive for our mental wellbeing, as we are reminded about the value of life, and that of those close to us.

In Everybody Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can’t  Look Away, Professor Wilson explores why we are drawn to the darker side of human psyche and the macabre events that touch our lives.  The attraction of these exact scenarios is what makes bestsellers out of thriller films and horror novels.  The author researched his own growing interest and found himself expanding his work into fields occupied by all manner of experts from biologists to anthropologists.     

The result, he found, was that ‘if we approach darkness in the right way, it can lead to light’.   It means that not only are we are able to learn from the mistakes of others, but we learn more about ourselves as well.  This is something well documented in Jungian psychology, as promoted by twentieth century psychology pioneer Carl Jung. 

As Wilson writes ‘Jung might say that we have a shadow side. Most of us go through life repressing it, yet it draws us to death and gore. But Jung says it’s psychologically healthy, because it can help us get to know ourselves.  Morbid curiosity allows us to think about the meaning of suffering and death.  If we open up empathetically to the other person it can make us more human’. 

The moral of this story then is that this in itself can make us better human beings as we learn to be more sensitive to the feelings of others.