Will the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, a first group of whom must be released on Friday, manage to recover psychologically? Difficult to answer, according to experts, as the ability to recover after such an ordeal varies unpredictably from one person to another.
“All people who come out of captivity […] do not develop post-traumatic stress or other mental disorders, but this is the case of a significant minority,” explains British psychiatrist Neil Greenberg, specialist in psychological trauma, to AFP.
The question arises as around ten hostages, women and children, are to be released on Friday as part of a truce concluded between Israel and Palestinian Hamas, after having been captive of the latter, in Gaza, for a month and half. The agreement provides for the release of a total of 50 hostages in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners.
Around 240 people were kidnapped in Israel on October 7, during the Hamas attack which caused the death of 1,200 people, the vast majority civilians, according to Israeli authorities.
What mental aftereffects will these hostages be left with? And, without there being any question of comparing the traumas, is there a psychological specificity compared to other experiences such as the bombings by Israel on Gaza, the cause of many civilian deaths?
In general, “there are no symptoms of post-traumatic stress that are specific to hostages,” says Mr. Greenberg.
On the other hand, the very experience of a hostage presents particularities likely to serve as a spring for future troubles: isolation, potential humiliation, feeling of powerlessness, etc.
In addition, hostage-taking, through the media coverage to which they are often subject, particularly highlights the victims’ ability to recover or not.
Some have foundered, like the journalist Brice Fleutiaux, who ended his life in 2001, shortly after being held hostage in Chechnya, or the heir John Paul Getty III, who never recovered from his kidnapped in Italy in the 1970s as a child, and plunged into a spiral of addiction that left him quadriplegic until his death.
Without being as dramatic, a vast series of post-traumatic symptoms have been recorded among 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, as paradoxical as it may seem, ultimately experience positive consequences from their experience on a psychological level.
How can these differences be explained? Psychiatrists struggle to answer and admit that it is difficult to know in advance whether one hostage is more likely than another to develop mental disorders.
“We have not clearly delineated the factors that lead to an unfavorable outcome after a hostage-taking,” admitted in 2009 the authors of a summary on the subject, in the journal of the British Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) .
However, some possible risk factors have been identified: being a woman, having a low level of education, having been sequestered for a long time, etc. But this work is dated and research is difficult to carry out on the subject.
“For ethical and practical reasons, particularly when children are involved, it is difficult to follow up with hostages after their release,” the RSM summary explains, 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, a necessarily limited point of view. Research also exists on former prisoners of war, a situation close but not equivalent to hostages.
Finally, one element complicates the monitoring of psychological after-effects: the disorders can take a long time to emerge.
“It can resurface one year, two years, ten years later, and it is absolutely unpredictable,” explains psychiatrist Christine Roullière, specialist in post-traumatic disorders, to AFP, who particularly emphasizes the need for treatment. upon the release of a hostage.
We must “immediately allow the person to verbalize what they may have experienced,” she insists. “It’s a way of putting back into the thread of one’s life the extraordinary events that took him to the other side of the looking glass. The objective is to support the return to the world of the living. »