Vampire panic!

What with Twilight and True Blood and all, these days there's tons of interest in all things vampire. So this, a story about vampires in Tampa Bay, FL, ought to be of interest to PANIC! readers. From the link:

Anyone who wants to get into a Vampire Gathering needs to see the gargoyles first. They're the protectors, the first line of defense against heckling street preachers and tourists.

The women move along, but I remain, the first reporter ever allowed past the gargoyles, the first permitted to give you — my fellow "mundanes'' — a glimpse into their vampire world.

The monthly Gathering at the Castle nightclub isn't a role-playing game or a convention of Twilight fans. These people don't sleep in coffins, fear garlic or live forever.

But they do feel a need to feed on others, whether that means absorbing energy or blood. They call themselves vampires and consider their yearnings a physical affliction. They say they can't absorb energy like "mundanes," who often start every morning revved up for the day. They wake drained, needing to be charged.

Vampires have looked for other names to define themselves. They don't quibble with "parasite."

Some feed on blood volunteered by donors who allow them to cut their skin and drink.

Some feed during sex, drawing from strong energy bonds with their lovers.

And some "psychic" feed, sipping life energy from the auras of others.

Why am I linking to this story, here, on this blog? Turns out that lots of these vampires have panic disorder and depression and other mental health issues:

A survey of about 950 vampires found that 30 percent reported having been diagnosed with depression, 16 percent suffer from panic disorder, and more than 15 percent have been diagnosed as bipolar. Lest you think the research is tainted by anti-vampire bias, you should know that it was conducted by vampires — led by a fellow in Atlanta who goes by Merticus.

One psychologist's guess as to why this is true:

The idea of the vampire has helped people make sense of their world since the earliest recorded stories.

From the 16th to the 18th centuries in Eastern Europe, villagers were digging up corpses, burning them, cutting them up, putting stakes in their still hearts — all to solve what they felt was a vampire problem.

They told tales of awaking paralyzed and finding a visitor from the grave lying beside them. Modern medicine would call that "hallucinatory sleep paralysis." But back in the day, vampires provided villagers with a scapegoat for death and disease.

Today's vampire serves a different purpose, writes British psychologist Meg Barker: "The social experiences explained by real vampirism seem to be those associated with a sense of difference. Many real vampires begin their accounts by saying that they always felt 'weird' and 'different' to the people around them . . .

"Their awakening as a vampire made sense of this experience."

Whatever works, I guess. Or, as another psychologist says:

"I sometimes think a worthy definition of mental health is when people can let go of conventional life when they want to while holding on to the reins firmly enough to get back in control when they need to," says Richard Leavy, a psychology professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.

"Vampires," he said, "seem to be doing both."