WuXi AppTec Content Team Editor
It has been one month since the “3.21” air disaster.
On April 20, the preliminary report of the investigation was released, but the specific reasons still need to be further investigated.
And the shadow, fear and pain left by this sudden disaster still linger in people’s hearts.
What kind of psychological trauma do those survivors or families of victims experience? How to treat to calm down?
Today I bring you the story of a survivor of an airplane accident.
“Pilot encountered difficulty”
August 24, 2001, 5:45 am GMT.
Margaret McKinnon’s flight was passing through the mid-Atlantic at an altitude of 12,000 meters.
She went into the bathroom of the plane and turned on the faucet, only to find that no water came out.
Figure | unsplash
She was joined by her husband, John Baljkas, who was fast asleep in the middle seat in economy class.
They are from Toronto, Canada, less than a week old, and on their way to Portugal for their honeymoon.
The landing is less than 2 hours away. Margaret had planned to go back to her seat to take a nap before landing, but she struggled with the tap for a long time, and finally had to give up.
What she didn’t know was that the plumbing in the airplane bathroom was driven by air pressure from a jet engine – which looked like a faucet problem, but suggested that there might be a deeper malfunction behind it.
As she walked down the dark aisle to the seat next to John, there was a sudden commotion among the passengers.
The small TV in the aisle stopped after a few minutes of a movie, and the lights in the cabin kept flickering.
She sat down next to John, who had just woken up, only to hear an announcement on the radio: “Pilot encountered difficulties“.
For a while, the passengers panicked and even cried loudly.
The crew was seen spreading out, instructing passengers to remove life jackets and shoes from under their seats.
A flight attendant began to speak, but she was in tears before she could finish. Another flight attendant said, “We’ll land in the water.”
I only heard a sound from the middle of the cabin, as if something was turned off, and the roar of the engine stopped, and suddenly I felt a gust of air around the fuselage blowing towards the fuselage. A dead silence.
At 6:26 a.m., someone said: “The engine is off.
Now, the 150-ton plane has lost all power, like a kite with a broken string, tossing and sinking from an altitude of 10,000 meters.
Figure | unsplash
“We’re going to die!” one passenger cried.
Darkness Before Dawn
Fortunately, Margaret grew up listening to sirens and fire detectors—her father was a deputy fire chief and her mother was a nurse.
She often hears stories of car accidents, people trapped in their homes, or escaping fires.
It was these stories of staying strong in the face of pain that made her unable to extricate herself and dreamed of becoming a writer when she grew up.
But after college, she took a new interest and majored in psychology. When she got engaged to her husband, she was already a Ph.D student in memory and brain pathways at the University of Toronto.
“It’ll be fine,” John told her.
On the plane, a couple struggles to put life jackets on their young child. Some people are crying, some are whispering, some are praying for God’s blessing, some are saying goodbye to their children and relatives…
Margaret, who had been asthmatic for many years, took a few hard breaths. Oxygen masks fell from above, but some were no longer working.
Margaret still remembers the thoughts in her heart at that moment: “My life is very happy now, I am content. My husband, I love him very much.”
But then,she became increasingly distracted and frightened, and the plane descended faster and faster. Since the ending is certain to die, no matter how optimistic and strong you are, you can only surrender.
She remembered a video she had seen before—the hijacking of an Ethiopian Airlines flight in 1996. After running out of fuel, the pilot attempted to make a forced landing in the Indian Ocean, and in the blurry footage, the plane quickly disintegrated as soon as it hit the water.
She knew in her heart that the chances of surviving the plane crashed into the water were still very slim.
At this point, Margaret had accepted the ending, but John couldn’t accept it – he believed that they would survive no matter what.
He also planned an escape: After following the plane into the sea, they climbed out of the plane’s exit and swam to the shore.
He said they were both good swimmers; he also theorized that hypothermia would not occur in warm Atlantic waters.
“Our shoes might work for a while,” he told his wife, “it’ll be fine.” She squeezed his hand.
At this point, the plane was continuing to descend and the disaster had been going on for 30 minutes. But for those who knew they were going to die, it felt like 10,000 years had passed.
Suddenly, the co-pilot informed everyone that in the next 5-7 minutes, they would try to land on a small island called Terceira in the Azores.
The pilot began to control the plane to spiral and glide—like a wine corkscrew, with unbearably violent motions, and everyone was thrown to the side. Then, the plane finally began to fly smoothly and accelerate.
Margaret’s thoughts kept jumping, thinking about what it would be like to land in the water, and what to do if she crashed on land.
Aftermath
Outside the window was the predawn darkness, barely seeing anything, but she caught a glimpse of land, and then water again.
Finally, the aircraft’s landing gear hit a hard surface. Her body rushed forward with inertia, and her ears were filled with scratching until the plane came to a complete stop.
Passengers began to cheer and applaud, but the crew quickly organized everyone to rush to the exit slide, fearing that the plane would explode on the ground.
After everyone got off the plane, several buses came and took the shivering and wounded survivors to a small terminal.
At this moment of relief, Margaret’s curiosity about science was blazing–How will all those who lived through this accident remember it in the future? What’s the matter?
She looked around as if everyone were walking ghosts-
They were still wearing life jackets, lying and sitting on the ground, and the smell of vomit was everywhere. “It’s horrible and cruel.”
But then she thought, “This issue (people’s memory of disasters) may really need to be studied.”
Shortly after returning to Canada, 9/11 occurred that same year, and the whole world was outraged.
She discovered that she had a strong sense of empathy with the passengers on planes hijacked in terrorist attacks—and had a nightmare about the plane crashing into up skyscrapers. But John didn’t feel the same way.
In April 2002, details about the plane crash were broadcast on television. Margaret watched the special with her husband at home. At this point, her life and career were profoundly changed by this experience.
She is still a young aspiring scientist pursuing a postdoc at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. Surprisingly, she can fly around the world despite being on high alert for danger.
Figure | unsplash
But she was plagued by nightmares and anxiety, dreaming back to that plane, that seat over and over again, and couldn’t escape.
Her research has also changed, with a growing interest in memory and post-traumatic stress disorder, a problem she herself is experiencing.
Why do I have anxiety and nightmares while other survivors of the comorbidity do not?
Her husband John, for example, didn’t have nightmares, was not changed or bothered by the accident, and was just happy that he survived.
Unexpected findings from research
So, she decided to study the topic with her colleagues.
It took them several years to find enough plane crash survivors willing to come to the study — 19 eventually did.
Like Margaret, half of them had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); the other half, like John, do not have these symptoms.
The study consisted of two main parts: brain scans, interviews with survivors, and analysis of the results.
Psychologists have long distinguished between two types of long-term memory of one’s own experiences, which are stored in different parts of the brain —
A type of memory called episode memory: related to the first-person perspective, emotion, specific point of view (such as the memory of Margaret struggling to breathe in her seat); p>
Another type is called non-episode memory: it is mostly objective facts and has nothing to do with a person’s subjective experience (such as her memory of flight numbers).
In this study,they wanted to see how many kinds of memories the survivors retained and whether those memories were accurate.
In 2004, Margaret was also a subject in her own study –When she first started reviewing the videotape of the accident, fear of death returned attack like.
She never imagined that she would be so emotionally burdened, and reading the interview transcripts of other survivors was exhausting.
They remembered details she didn’t remember – the smell of something burning, the dark environment, the shivering voice of the stewardess, the countdown to the pilot’s landing; Shouting: “We have a runway! We have a runway!
Figure | unsplash
In 2014-2015, two studies of survivors of the plane crash were published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.
Researchers have found that the emotional memory centers of the brains of plane crash survivors — the amygdala, hippocampus, midline frontal, and posterior regions — increased blood pressure when watching footage of the crash video at the time. Traffic will increase.
When researchers showed air crash survivors news footage of the events of 9/11, very similar enhanced activity occurred in the brains of many; The responses (of those who did not experience the accident) to both disasters were more neutral.
But most surprisingly, all survivors, with or without PTSD, showed a “strong memory-enhancing effect” —< /strong>
In other words, both types of people’s memories of this event contain an exceptionally rich plot and first-person details.
PTSD has long been associated with “vivid traumatic memories.”
But apparently, this study finds that if a person simply retains lucid traumatic memories, it does not mean that those memories are intrusive.
This suggests that PTSD is not necessarily motivated by the storage of emotional memories, but other factors may be involved.
Also, 30% of people with PTSD experience a “numbing effect”, in which they become numb and shut down when recalling memories Feel.
But neither “overstimulation” nor “out of sight” are healthy responses.
Popular Science Time
Why do different people respond differently to trauma?
PTSD occurs in 5%-10% of the population, and is twice as common in women as in men.
“We know there are some risk factors,” Margaret said, “but there is no way to predict exactly whether a person will develop PTSD.”
p>She said that people with a history of trauma may be more vulnerable, as well as those who have been socially marginalized — such as those who have been bullied, humiliated, discriminated against, or People who grew up in toxic stressful environments.
Figure | unsplash
She herself, for example, had a history of depression prior to that flight,and depression may also be a risk factor for PTSD.
How is PTSD treated?
For many years, the mainstays of post-traumatic stress have been basically talk therapy: exposure therapy, which involves reliving fearful memories, gradual desensitization, and cognitive-behavioral therapy, etc. .
But both Margaret and her colleagues believe that healing trauma is not just about identifying or erasing bad memories, but also trying to use a third-person perspective to tell your own story outside the box. , as if telling someone else’s story.
nearlyIn 2008 there was an emerging technology called “Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing”(EMDR). During therapy, patients are asked to recall traumatic memories in their minds, while a therapist instructs them to rhythmically move their eyes back and forth from side to side.
This method sounds strange, but it is effective and is gaining more and more acceptance in the mainstream medical community.
But further research is needed on why it works — some believe the technology mimics the way the brain integrates and processes memories during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
In conclusion, patients who are prone to first-person horror of their memory often become simply “remembering” the experience after EMDR treatment.
Margaret McKinnon is now an associate professor of psychiatry at McMaster University and an associate professor of psychiatry at the Homewood Research Institute in Ontario. Ontario) senior professor.
After years of therapy and more than 20 years of research, she says now that she’s reminiscing about the accident, she still remembers a lot of detail, but isn’t scared at all.
She has played these memories over and over in her mind, just like watching someone else’s story.
In the future, she will continue to explore to benefit more patients.
References
[1] How to Remembera Disaster Without Being Shattered by It | WIRED. Retrieved Apr 27, 2022 from https:https://www.wired.com/story/remember-disaster-without -being-shattered-ptsd-covid/
[2] McKinnon, M. C., Palombo, D. J., Nazarov, A., Kumar, N., Khuu, W., & Levine, B. (2015). Threat of death and autobiographical memory: A study of passengers from FlightAT236. Clinical psychological science, 3(4), 487-502. https:https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702614542280
[3] Harricharan, S., McKinnon, M. C., Tursich, M., Densmore, M., Frewen, P., Théberge, J., … & Lanius, R. A. (2019 ). Overlapping frontoparietal networks in response toculomotion and traumatic autobiographical memory retrieval: Implications foreye movement desensitization and reprocessing. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 10(1), 1586265. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2019.1586265
[3] Lanius, R. A., Vermetten, E., Loewenstein, R. J., Brand, B., Schmahl, C., Bremner, J.D., & Spiegel, D. (2010). Emotion modulation in PTSD: Clinical and neurobiological evidence for a dissociative subtype. American Journal of Psychiatry, 167(6), 640-647. https:https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.09081168
[4]Yehuda, R., Hoge, C. W., McFarlane, A. C., Vermetten, E., Lanius, R. A., Nievergelt, C. M., … & Hyman, S. E. (2015). Post-traumatic stress disorder. Nature Reviews Disease Primers, 1(1), 1-22.
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