Will the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, a first group of whom are due to be released on Friday, manage to recover psychologically? According to experts, this is difficult to answer because the ability to recover from such an ordeal varies greatly from person to person.
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“Not all people emerging from captivity (…) develop post-traumatic stress or other psychological disorders, but this is the case for a significant minority,” British psychiatrist Neil Greenberg, a specialist in psychological trauma, told AFP.
The question comes as about 10 hostages, women and children, are set to be released on Friday as part of a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas after being held captive by Hamas in Gaza for a month and a half. The agreement calls for the release of a total of 50 hostages in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners.
According to Israeli authorities, about 240 people were kidnapped during the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, which killed 1,200 people, the vast majority of them civilians.
What spiritual consequences will these hostages leave behind? And without comparing the traumas, is there a psychological peculiarity compared to other experiences such as Israel’s bombings on Gaza, which were the cause of many civilian deaths?
In general, “there are no symptoms of post-traumatic stress that are specific to hostages,” Mr. Greenberg says.
On the other hand, the experience of being a hostage itself has peculiarities that can serve as a trigger for future problems: isolation, possible humiliation, feeling of powerlessness…
In addition, frequent media coverage of hostage situations particularly highlights the victims’ ability to recover or not.
Some have failed, like journalist Brice Fleutiaux, who ended his life shortly after being taken hostage in Chechnya in 2001, or heir John Paul Getty III, who never recovered from his kidnapping in Italy in the 1970s when he was a child . and fell into a spiral of addiction that left him paralyzed until his death.
Without being so dramatic, a variety of post-traumatic symptoms have been observed in former hostages: difficulty concentrating and memory loss, bouts of depression or anxiety, withdrawal from social life.
Difficult to study
But victims still tend to regain control of their lives, and some former hostages, paradoxical as it may seem, ultimately experience positive consequences from their experience on a psychological level.
How can these differences be explained? Psychiatrists struggle with the answer, admitting that it is difficult to know in advance whether one hostage is more likely to develop mental disorders than another.
“We have not clearly described the factors that lead to an adverse outcome after a hostage situation,” the authors admitted in a 2009 abstract on the subject in the journal of Britain’s Royal Society of Medicine (RSM).
However, some possible risk factors have been identified: being a woman, having a low level of education, being sequestered for a long time… However, this work is outdated and it is difficult to conduct research on this topic.
“For ethical and practical reasons, particularly when children are involved, it is difficult to follow up with hostages after their release,” explains the RSM summary, highlighting the risk of reactivating trauma by interviewing former hostages. “The medical and scientific data are therefore relatively modest.”
Many studies are based on autobiographies of former hostages, an inevitably limited perspective. There are also studies of former prisoners of war, a situation similar but not equivalent to that of hostages.
Finally, one element complicates the monitoring of psychological consequences: it can take a long time for the disorders to appear.
“It can reappear a year, two years, ten years later, and it is absolutely unpredictable,” explains psychiatrist Christine Roullière, specialist in post-traumatic disorders, to AFP, emphasizing in particular the need for treatment when a hostage is released.
We must “immediately allow the person to put into words what they may have experienced,” she emphasizes. “It is a way to tie the extraordinary events that led him to the other side of the mirror back into the thread of his life. The aim is to support the return to the world of the living.”