Wartime Polyvictimization and the Effects of Trauma: How the Human Reacts After Experiencing Trauma in Warzones

• In Event: Exploring Experiences of Victimization Risks and Consequences Across a Range of Contexts

Abstract

Wartime mental victimization across conflict zones leaves a disastrous legacy for survivors, tribes, communities, and whole nations. Being psychologically victimized by traumatic events pervades not only personal relationships, but almost every aspect of daily life, including the perception of the “new” environment, once settled as a refugee. Trauma-induced disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and its concomitant effects pose not only an obstacle to the suffering individual itself but also to the process of reintegration and re-organizing one’s life. As stress and mental well-being are closely connected, heightened stress can lead to challenges in emotions, cognition, and behavior. Symptoms of stress include intrusion, avoidance, negative thought patterns, mood swings, and heightened arousal. Typical wartime trauma-related repercussions that victimize survivors mentally include re-experiencing the trauma, intruding memory (reverberation memory, flashbacks), nightmares, persistent feeling of numbness and emotional numbness, indifference to other people, avoidance of situations that evoke the trauma, vegetative excitability, excessive jumpiness, with depression symptoms to suicidal thoughts not being exempt. With the help of the harvard trauma questionnaire (HTQ) and qualitative interviews, this papers uncovers how victims of war (N=15) react to trauma and how far these experiences still pervade their struggle to make it every day.

Author

• Zeineb Sassi, University of Hamburg / Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry, University of Regensburg