Someone needs to fucking go around to all these psychiatrists and slap them with a "keep it simple, stupid."
Its a very simple thing, if you're a hostage stuck in one place, you're a citizen of this fucking bank vault or this cellar or whatever, not a citizen of Sweden who is concerned about matters of criminality and economy. And when you're stuck in there, the people holding you hostage, however polite or impolite they might be, are offering to get you out of there in exchange for concessions, their goal results in you being let go.
Very simple from that point of view, so then if the state is like, alright we'll take that deal, you're gonna be pretty happy with them for arranging that without much fuss, if instead they tell you that you have a duty to die for your country, and that they will not take the deal but instead start a firefight or start bombing the whole place, you're not gonna be very happy, because your life has been calculated and valued below the priority of punishing criminality and ensuring the bank doesnt get robbed.
You're gonna be pretty fucking unhappy with that situation, and the longer it goes on and the more your captors are trying to arrange a deal, and particularly if they are being polite and relatively considerate about the whole thing, you're gonna be more concerned with who is resolving the situation rather than who is responsible for it in the first place, because time is fucking linear and the past cant be changed but the future can, simple concept.
The "Stockholm Syndrome" theory is even more crackpot than that. Yes, absolutely that's true: the person this theory is based on has said multiple times over the years that the reason she pretended to sympathize with her captors was to protect herself from an over-aggressive police force. Pretended is key here, she did not actually sympathize with them at all; it was purely a manipulation on her part part to survive (and no shade here she was very smart and I love this for her). However, the psychiatrist's theory about it was that she, as a woman, developed feelings for her captors because of, in his mind, the latent sexual desires of women to fall for strong men and to be dominated by them. So, yes, as usual when our bunk science is not based in racism it is usually based in some outlandish sexist notions (and sometimes both!).
i dont think it's fair to be this dismissive about psychological help - plenty of people I know have been helped through PTSD/C-PTSD from psychologists and would not otherwise be here today 🤷♀️
drug sniffing dogs, too, just to make sure. There's a reason there's like 30 years of research into animals with even more sensitive noses that never gets anywhere, you can't intuitive signal a bee to signal
like, actually psychology is mostly fine -- pop psychology is completely fucked, almost entirely made up, and reliant on garbage research conducted under horrific circumstances, though.
Pop psychology is always like "These experiments would never pass ethics boards today, but even if they were unethical, they still showed us more into the human mind than any other research today", but then you look at the research and it just says "We found that people feel bad when they're in a stressful situation. We made someone decapitate a live animal to find that out."
Do these people think that the captivity is so bad that it altered their psychological state to be permanently sympathetic in a span of a few weeks?
Like abuse victims will try to justify their abuse and their abuser, but that often takes many years to develop. And even victims of kidnappers and serial killers who suffer within a comparable timeframe aren’t permanently sympathetic to the killer lol, they drop that shit as soon as they’re free.
I can’t even recall any abused or tortured POWs who weren’t immediately traumatized after they’re released. They don’t wave and hug anyone unless they weren’t tortured in captivity. This is crazy.
I wonder how Stockholm Syndrome enthusiasts try to explain that none of Ariel Castro's three victims fell in love with him, even though it was a much longer captivity.