Baby whispering or wickedness?
Is Derek Ogilvie telepathic or simply tuning into family issues?
Scotsman Derek Ogilvie claims that - as well as being a medium who can see dead people - he can communicate telepathically with children too young to verbalise their thoughts. He asserts that, by reading a child's innermost thoughts and feelings, he can diagnose family problems and examine familial issues from that child's perspective.
Derek's website is currently being reconstructed whilst he enjoys enviable fame and fortune in Holland, where his television show The Ghost Whisperer - which showcases his talent as a medium - has proven very popular, achieving more than a million viewers. His theatre tour of Holland sold out rapidly and he has also released a DVD of one of the live theatre shows there, as well as a baby book.
Born in 1965 in Paisley, Derek acknowledges that, although he was aware that he was "different" from an early age, he did not become a professional medium until 2000, shortly after facing bankruptcy during a time that he refers to as when "his life fell apart".
As he recalls, he was shopping in the supermarket when he heard his grandmother, recently deceased, instructing him to seek employment with a radio station. He contacted QFM, a local Glasgow station, and soon had his own weekly show called Psychic Sunday, from which point his career took off.
Displayed on one page of his Dutch fan club website, are a host of press articles that clearly illustrate his popularity and the esteem with which, in Holland at least, Derek is regarded. In the UK, however, there is less effusive praise.
OFCOM received a number of complaints about Derek's 2006 Channel Five series The Baby Mind Reader, including concerns that the series was "in poor taste" as well as "exploitative of vulnerable people". Those complaints were not upheld, on the basis that the advice given by Derek was based upon facts that he had first verified with the parents who took part in the show, rather than on any psychic ability. This, as commentators were quick to point out, suggests that no psychic ability was being manifested at all.
Derek's reading of young children can lead to considerable distress for their parents. In one well-documented case, Derek refers to the tragic death of a fourteen-month old little boy, reducing his distraught mother to tears. Another case in point, documented by the UK Sceptics website, raised the issue of the sexual abuse of the mother of the child being "read", which apparently occurred when she was just fourteen. Derek seems to claim that the child - twenty-one months old - had images of that abuse in her mind and was afraid that, when she reached fourteen, she would suffer similarly.
Derek has undoubtedly touched a great many lives with his professed abilities, but failed to conclusively demonstrate those abilities in tests such as those he underwent in ‘Extraordinary People' (September 2008, Channel Five). Is he merely reading the parents - using information he already has and observations he makes at the time - and not communicating at all with the children? Or can he really communicate with them via telepathy?
