Trauma and the truth

Abstract

Witnessing horrible things may leave a person scarred for life — an effect usually referred to as psychological trauma. We do not know exactly what it does or how it worms its way into our psyche, but psychological trauma has been linked to a wide range of fear- and depression-related symptoms (Bonanno and Mancine 2012), and has been linked with even more extreme forms of psychopathology. In one famous example, one of the first patients diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder claimed her personality split in two to deal with the traumatizing sight of her dead grandmother (Thigpen and Cleckley 1954).