In almost every one of our portraits of near-death researchers the same acronym appears sooner or later: IANDS – the International Association for Near-Death Studies. Kenneth Ring was its co-founder and first president, Bruce Greyson edited its journal for decades, Jan Holden served as its president, Peter Fenwick was one of its prominent advocates. Time to introduce the organisation itself – because without it, near-death research as a scholarly field would probably not exist.
The beginning: a book and a meeting
The prehistory begins in 1975 with Raymond Moody's Life After Life – the book that coined the term "near-death experience" and reached an audience of millions. Moody was subsequently flooded with letters from experiencers, and it quickly became clear that a single author could handle this neither scientifically nor humanly.
In November 1977 John Audette, a young sociologist, invited interested parties to Charlottesville, Virginia – among them Moody himself, the social psychologist Kenneth Ring, the psychiatrist Bruce Greyson and the cardiologist Michael Sabom. Out of this meeting, in 1978, came the Association for the Scientific Study of Near-Death Phenomena – the unwieldy name was the point: from the outset this was about the scientific study of the phenomenon, not a community of believers. Audette led the young organisation as its first executive director.
1981: relaunch as IANDS
In 1981 the association reorganised: under the leadership of Kenneth Ring – now its first president – it moved to the University of Connecticut and adopted its present name. The researchers' circle became a membership organisation that wanted to be two things at once: a learned society for the research and a point of contact for experiencers. IANDS has kept this dual role to this day – and it is the same pattern its national sister organisations later adopted.
The journal: the most consequential building block
The young IANDS' most consequential step was a journal. It started in 1981 under the title Anabiosis; from 1982 it appeared as the Journal of Near-Death Studies – to this day the only peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted exclusively to near-death research. Kenneth Ring was its founding editor; in 1982 Bruce Greyson took over and shaped the journal for over a quarter of a century, before Jan Holden assumed the post in 2008.
Why this matters so much: a field without its own journal has no place where studies can be peer-reviewed, criticised and built upon. Only the journal turned scattered individual findings into a cumulative research tradition – from Ring's measurement instruments to Greyson's NDE Scale to Holden's analysis of veridical perceptions. Alongside it, the member magazine Vital Signs has appeared since 1981, with experiencer accounts and news from the field.
Conferences, groups, support
IANDS has held conferences since 1982, annually since 1993 – the place where researchers and experiencers actually meet. Added to this is a network of local groups: at last count over 80 "Friends of IANDS" groups in the USA and more internationally, supplemented since the pandemic by online sharing groups that experiencers can join from anywhere in the world. For doctors, nurses and chaplains IANDS provides training material – the people who are first to hear a patient's near-death account should know what is being reported to them.
Membership recently stood at around 1,400 – small measured against how widespread the phenomenon is, but carried by a remarkable amount of academic substance.
The worldwide family
IANDS sees itself as the international anchor of a larger network. In many countries independent organisations have formed on its model – in the German-speaking world the Netzwerk Nahtoderfahrung e.V., which expressly describes itself as part of the "worldwide IANDS family" and lives the same dual role: informing the public, supporting experiencers.
Context
You can measure the significance of IANDS with a simple question: what would near-death research be without it? There would be Moody's bestseller and scattered individual studies – but no journal that hardens findings through peer review, no conference holding the field together, no points of contact for people left alone with a life-changing experience. The four men of the Charlottesville meeting did not merely found an association in 1978; they built the infrastructure of a research field – and almost fifty years later, it still carries.
Sources: The IANDS website, iands.org; the entry "International Association for Near-Death Studies" in the Psi Encyclopedia of the Society for Psychical Research (founding history, journal, group and membership figures); supplemented by our portraits of Kenneth Ring, Bruce Greyson and Jan Holden.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory – IANDS is listed there together with the Journal of Near-Death Studies.