Feature
Crash course
by Matt Nippert
Teenagers exposed to horrific tragedies like the Christchurch hit and run may not react as adults do, an American trauma expert shares his insights into their feelings.
It’s late on a Saturday night. Booze is flowing and the partying crowd has spilt out from the flat, with more than 300 teens milling on Edgeware Rd. There’s shouting, the odd scuffle, but nothing prepares you for what happens next.
A red Nissan ploughs through the crowd. Two die in front of you. Ten are injured, some seriously. There is blood and screams. Weeks later, after the funerals of Jane Young and Hannah Rossiter, you’re preparing to get on with your life as if nothing had happened – but what happens when memories of that night linger?
From Columbine to Virginia Tech, Katrina to September 11, tragic events in the US have provided researchers with insights into how young people cope with trauma. And Frank Ochberg, clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University, has been studying the subject for decades.
Ochberg has worked with Scotland Yard and the US Secret Service. He defined “Stockholm Syndrome” for FBI hostage negotiators and was part of the team that put post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) onto the books as an official psychiatric syndrome in 1980.
After the 1999 Columbine school shootings, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 of their fellow students before turning their guns on themselves, Ochberg also spent three years working as a consultant to the school.
In an opinion piece for the Washington Post a year after the shootings, he wrote, “I have seen Columbine struggle to recover from a form of PTSD – the disorder most associated with survivors of war – and the shame and blame that attach to the profoundly wounding trauma the community suffered.”
Speaking from his home in Okemos, Michigan, Ochberg says the disorder is diagnosed only a month after a traumatic event, if sufferers experience three symptoms: flashbacks, numbness and nerves.
He says that flashbacks are “a par-ti-cular type of hot memory – it’s got a signature when you do a brain scan that doesn’t look like a regular, autobiographical memory”.
Although these memories are depicted as vivid violent hallucination in films about Vietnam war veterans such as Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth, Ochberg says these are not universal. “Sometimes it’s not that intense at all, it’s very subtle. It’s like déjà vu, it’s just a feeling or a sensation, or your heart goes faster and it takes a while to realise what’s going on.”
The other symptoms relate to numbness. Ochberg says he’s treated Vietnam veterans with extremely sad complaints: “I’ve had countless people tell me, ‘You know, doc? I know I love my daughter, I just don’t feel it the way I used to. What can I do to get the feeling back?’”
Finally, nerves can continue to be frayed, resulting in the sufferer being edgy and having sleep problems. “You don’t actually have more adrenalin, but your arousal mechanisms are on a hair trigger,” says Ochberg.
Sometimes PTSD can be encountered in distant witnesses, especially in children. Shortly after September 11, 2001, the New York Times reported that in an attempt to identify with classmates who had lost parents several young children at a Brooklyn school were falsely claiming that their fathers had died in the World Trade Center i.
And the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology reported in May 2002 that an 11-year-old boy was diagnosed with PTSD and major depression after repeatedly watching television footage of the attacks.
For teenagers, experiencing grief and shock can be more complex than for adults who experience similar events, says Jane Faulkner, head of guidance at Avondale College. Last year she had to counsel several students after they witnessed a murder outside the school gates. “Teenagers are already moving towards independence and working through their own challenges and mood swings and relations with parents,” she says. “Often their response is to isolate and withdraw and spend time with friends.”
But coping with trauma in a teenage peer group can be fraught, says Ochberg. “If it’s a male group there can be a lot of strong angry feelings, but there’s also the capacity for feeling embarrassed, ashamed and confused that gets covered over.”
Meanwhile, with girls, “There’s a fair amount of nastiness. They’re not all mean, but it’s not always a very supportive community.”
Ochberg says that warning signs for parents come after a month, “when you start to see signs of distress that worry you: a change in personality, eating habits, sleeping habits, not caring the way he or she used to care about friends”.
Detective Sergant Rob Huys handled the investigation into Julie Johnson, who was found guilty of manslaughter in 2004 after driving into a crowd of 300 teens partying in Whangarei, killing one and injuring 13.
Huys still sometimes bumps into witnesses and victims from that night and says he’s noticed a change in many who escaped physical injury. “It’s safe to say that they’ve become quite hardened to the ways of the world since that night.”
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