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.”
The number of those teenagers who develop PTSD after experiencing a traumatic event varies depending on the severity of the event. The US-based National Centre for PTSD points to studies that show the rate for those children who witness their parents being raped or murdered is close to 100 percent, while for those exposed to school shootings the proportion is three in four. For general trauma, studies show the rate varies between three and 15 percent.
Ochberg says that treatment for PTSD has evolved since the diagnosis was formalised more than two decades ago. “There used to be a trend to get every-one who was there together talking about what they witnessed and what they’re feeling. But that’s not natural.”
The approach now stresses waiting until people are ready, a process that can cause significant distress in families, says Ochberg. He stayed with a husband and wife in Columbine: she was the school’s dean, while he was the wrestling coach from the neighbouring school.
“She was a talker and he was a wonderfully supportive husband – but he wasn’t a talker. After three or four months goes by, I’m staying over at their house, and he goes, ‘Frank, when is she going to get over it?’”
She needed someone outside the family to talk to, says Ochberg. “The most dramatic difference is between the talker and the non-talker, and they have to learn to respect one another.”
Ochberg says the tragedy of Columbine also offers some lessons in community healing. The parents of shooters Harris and Klebold suffered a torrid time, with memorials to their dead children hacked down in the night.
“These parents were essentially drummed out of the community, and they were hated and they were sued.”
This behaviour in turn created more trauma for the community, says Ochberg. “You shouldn’t blame the parents. Show me a parent who knows exactly what his teenage son or daughter is doing all the time, and I’ll show you a parent who is stunting the emotional growth of their child.”
As for those teens who went through Columbine, and those present at the vehicular rampage in Christchurch, the rapid maturation noted by Huys on the streets of Whangarei will be tempered by experience.
“They feel like survivors, not victims,” says Ochberg. “They understand what they’ve been through. They’re not happy: they’re sadder and wiser.”