[HPforGrownups] Re: Post-Hogwarts PTSD

[Monika Huebner]

No: HPFGUIDX 11030

On Fri, 26 Jan 2001 15:55:16 -0600, Penny & Bryce Linsenmayer
<pennylin at swbell.net> wrote:

>naama_gat at hotmail.com wrote:
>
>> After all, most people who have fought in wars do not get PTSD.
>
>I could be wrong, but I think that might be a bit of a generalization.  I
>think I've read something somewhere that a majority of Vietnam vets
>suffered some degree of PTSD at some point in their lives.

Penny, you are absolutely right about this. I have done quite a bit of
research about PTSD since last summer and it is a common condition in
people who have suffered one or more traumata. The following paragraph
is a citation from a fact sheet of the National Center for PTSD at
Dartmouth which can be found at http://www.ncptsd.org :

"About 30 percent of the men and women who have spent time in war
zones experience PTSD. An additional 20 to 25 percent have had partial
PTSD at some point in their lives. Thus more than half of all male
Vietnam veterans and almost half of all female Vietnam veterans have
experienced "clinically serious stress reaction symptoms." PTSD has
also been detected among veterans of the Gulf War, with some estimates
running as high as 8 percent."

>> My point in all this is that Harry probably will not suffer from PTSD.
>> I doubt that he will ever go through a more horrible experience than
>> the graveyard scene. And according to the canon he has
>> emotionally survived this.

You can develop PTSD years and years after the original trauma. The
official diagnostic criteria include a specification whether the
disorder is

- acute: if duration of symptoms is less than 3 months (if the
symptoms last only up to one month, it is not PTSD but ASD, Acute
Stress Disorder);

- chronic: if duration of symptoms is 3 months or more;   or

- with Delayed Onset: if onset of symptoms is at least 6 months after
the stressor.

Note the "at least" in the third criterion. You may very well develop
PTSD ten, twenty or thirty years after suffering the trauma, that's a
fact. The above diagnostic criteria were taken from DSM-IV - American
Psychiatric Association (1994), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for
Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. Washington, D.C. 

>If the books are only going to get darker (per JKR), how do you figure
>that Harry has already lived through the worst of it?  I personally
>didn't think he'd have faced what he did in GoF (I was shocked that
>Voldemort was back in full-force in the *4th* book -- didn't expect it
>until the 6th or even 7th book myself).  But, he *is* back, and I don't
>think the coming "War" is going to be a cakewalk for anyone involved.  I
>don't think poor Harry has gone through the worst of it by any means.

I don't think so either. And the more often you are traumatized, the
more likely you are to develop PTSD at some point in your life. This
is why I think it is nearly impossible that Sirius does *not* have it.
Even if you don't believe that Pettigrew's betrayal and the death of
Harry's parents wasn't enough to traumatize him (and I think it was
enough), it is absolutely impossible to spend twelve years in a place
like Azkaban and get away without being traumatized. I have seen
reports of ongoing studies about political prisoners of former Eastern
Germany who had been jailed without ever committing a crime, they go
on to develop PTSD, and they haven't necessarily been tortured. I
don't want to go into details about what happens to survivors of
concentration camps. You may tell me that Azkaban isn't exactly a
concentration camp, but I can see a lot of parallels here. And if you
know the symptoms of PTSD, it isn't really difficult to put a label on
each and every behavior Sirius has shown in PoA. 

>> We should remember, however, that generally speaking people are tough
>> and can survive very difficult times without breaking up emotionally
>> (which is what I think PTSD is basically).
>
>I'm sure Carole or Monika or someone else more knowledgeable about PTSD
>can speak to this more than I can .... but my personal take is that
>you're viewing PTSD as some sort of personal weakness that could be
>overcome with enough strength of character.  I don't think this is
>necessarily true, but I admittedly am not too knowledgeable about this
>topic.

You are right another time here, Penny. PTSD has *nothing* to do with
personal weakness, it's a biological reaction to a major stressor that
got stuck at some point. (Just a note, English is not my first
language, so please bear with me, I try to explain it as best as I
can.) I have also been very interested in evolutionary theory for the
last ten years, and when I began my research about PTSD, I thought I
would enter an entirely different field (psychology), but in fact it
overlaps a lot. PTSD has it's roots in an old biological defense
mechanism that all mammals have built in, the so-called fight and
flight mechanism which dates back to our ancestors in the savannah.
This defense mechanism is the response of our nervous system to a
major stressor, it's a survival reflex. When an individual faces a
traumatic threat, the Limbic system is activated and releases hormones
that prepare the body for defensive action. This activates the
Sympathetic branch, a part of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) that
will prepare the body for fight or flight. The ANS includes another
branch, the Parasympathetic (PNS) branch. Normally only one of these
branches is activated, but during a prolonged threat (such as torture,
rape or being kept prisoner in a camp) the Limbic system also
activates the PNS which can result in a state of freezing. If this
happens, time will slow down for the victim of the trauma, and he/she
will feel no fear nor pain. During this time, memories are stored
differently than they are normally, that is in a different part of the
brain where they cannot be recalled consciously. These responses of
the ANS are *instinctive*, reflex actions. That's a very healthy
survival mechanism. When the ANS continues to be chronically aroused,
even though the threat has passed, it is PTSD. This happens  when the
victim has no time to "calm down" and resolve the trauma, i.e. because
the next trauma already knocks on the door (i.e. in repeatedly
sexually abused children). To be on topic I'd say that this is what
happened to Sirius. My take is that he was suffering from Acute Stress
Disorder when he went after Pettigrew, that is why it was so easy to
defeat him. And instead of getting help and support, he was sent to
Azkaban straight away - not exactly the right place to resolve his
trauma - where he was chronically retraumatized over twelve years. He
also developed a major depression, which ironically saved him from the
dementors (as specified by JKR herself, dementors cause clinical
depression). 

This has gotten longer than I had intended, but I hope I have cleared
a few things up with this post.

Another very good resource about PTSD are David Baldwin's Trauma
Information Pages:
http://www.trauma-pages.com

And if anyone is interested in peer reviewed articles, try
Traumatology:
http://www.fsu.edu/~trauma/

Monika Huebner


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