Image: Photograph by Adam Voorhes. Photographed at The Department of Psychology and Institute for Neuroscience, University of Texas at Austin
In Brief
- Convention held that psychological resilience to life’s stresses remained a fairly rare event, a product of lucky genes or good parenting.
- Research into bereavement and natural disasters has found in recent years that the quality of resilience is, in fact, relatively commonplace.
- People respond to the worst life has to offer with varied behaviors, some of which might be classified as narcissistic or dysfunctional in some other way.
- But these behaviors—coping ugly, as one researcher calls it—ultimately help with adaptation in a crisis.
- The question arises whether interventions to teach resilience—programs already instituted in schools and in the military—will really help if people cope naturally on their own.
In fall 2009 Jeannine Brown Miller was driving home with her husband after a visit with her mother in Niagara Falls, N.Y. She came upon a police roadblock near the entrance to the Niagara University campus. Ambulance lights flashed up ahead. Miller knew her 17-year-old son, Jonathan, had been out in his car. Even though she couldn’t make out what was happening clearly, something told her she should stop. She asked one of the emergency workers on the scene to check whether the car had the license plate “J Mill.” A few minutes later a policeman and a chaplain approached, and she knew, even before they reached her, what they would say.
The loss of her son—the result of an undiagnosed medical problem that caused his sudden death even before his car rammed a tree—proved devastating. Time slowed to a crawl in the days immediately after Jonathan’s death. “The first week was like an eternity,” she says. “I lived minute by minute, not even hour by hour. I would just wake up and not think beyond what was in front of me.”
This article was originally published with the title The Neuroscience of True Grit.
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10 Comments
Add CommentOur living instinct is so strong what may be tragedy occurred on us living instinct overcome it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI enjoyed the article. I can see why "Army Chief of Staff William Casey was anxious to help rank-and-file soldiers who faced repeated deployments." It is unfortunate that Casey does not get support to solve the problem by not having excessive deployments of the same soldiers. The WWII South Pacific vets on my street, when I was a kid, were not ok. There are many Vietnam vets my age who are not ok. I question if "our innate capacity to bounce back" is able to deal with what happens in many military situations
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishow do i read the rest of this article without subscribing!?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe post is very informative. It is a pleasure reading it. I have also bookmarked you for checking out new posts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<a href=" http://www.examconfidence.co.uk/easter-revision">Easter revision courses</a>
There is a big difference between a single catastrophe and a series of constant threat and repeated catastrophe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou could go to a public library if there is one near you. Otherwise you don't. Scientific American is a for profit entity and they have to make money somehow. TANSTAAFL!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisId be very interested in applying “resilience” in my every day life. I’m an ordinary person living in the UK. I have been involved in situations that have left me feeling badly shaken. The normal response is go see you doctor and see what he will give you. I don’t need chemical bandages. What is there out there to help me “bounce back”
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDear Editor,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe March 2011 issue of Scientific American includes an article by Gary Stix, "The Neuroscience of True Grit," which I believe is quite flawed for the following reasons:
1. The author treats anxiety (fear, stress) as the same as grief (a form of sadness), in his invoking fight/flight as if “the brain’s alarm system” operates identically in sadness as in fear. While there is good reason to believe there is an overlap in these two emotional states, I don’t think you can view their physiological basis or behavioral expression as identical. Here is how I treat these two states in a paper I have written: “Sadness, like fear, signals distress. Our capacity to experience these emotions is of genetic origin, but this does not mean fear and sadness are abnormal states. They qualify as normal because they are time limited functional reactions to threats to survival. The connection between fear and the flight/fight response was selected genetically as an integrated survival mechanism. Similarly, the connection between loss and sadness reveals the importance to survival of establishing and maintaining social relationships and holding onto valued conditions and objects. Because fear and sadness accompany behaviors that are disruptions of other behaviors necessary for survival, of necessity these states ordinarily operate only temporarily. When the stressors to survival that elicited fear disappear the organism returns to normal behaviors that sustain life. Likewise, with respect to sadness, with time the losses that elicited sadness are replaced by accommodation or compensation, enabling the individual to return to normal activities. Since fear and sadness serve a purpose as temporary survival mechanisms, they do not ordinarily represent illnesses. Fear becomes abnormal when it continues to govern actions in the absence of objective danger. Fear then functions to maintain recurring dysfunctional behaviors. Phobias are a readily recognizable example of this abnormality. Sadness also becomes abnormal, i.e., is properly diagnosed as depression, when the behaviors necessary to replace what has been lost are blocked. When this happens sadness is transformed into depression because, as is the case with fear, the individual comes to function in such a way as to maintain recurring dysfunctional behaviors. Contrary to current practice, diagnoses of depression should be reserved for patients who meet this standard. There is abundant evidence that normal states of sadness are today being diagnosed as illnesses, with many people who are not ill being prescribed antidepressant drugs.”
2. Grief is the most intense form of sadness and the article treats its course as ordinarily following some normal process of resolution (resiliency) – not an unusual characterization for grief. What I find interesting about this characterization is that despite the intensity of grief reactions, the process is regarded as normal, not an illness calling for drug treatment (except, as stated, in unusual cases). However, many of the characteristics of grief are cited in diagnoses of depression as reasons for prescribing drugs – an inconsistency that goes uncommented upon here in discussing resiliency and elsewhere in discussions of grief and depression (although this is very muddy in practice, with people in grief being prescribed antidepressants).
3. Using terms like “melancholy” as an indication of a good grief response and “unrelenting grief” as a bad one, contributes nothing but confusion since they are defined by their outcome and have no explanatory value.
4. I don’t believe Seligman’s research on positive psychology is an appropriate guide for treatment in this area or has much relevancy. Stress inoculation studies are probably more relevant, but even in that case I doubt the value of this approach, given the intensity and specificity of the traumatic events. I haven’t followed the outcome literature on this at all closely, but I believe cognitive behavior therapy has shown itself to be more effective than drugs and that the Army has moved in that direction. CBT has the advantage of focusing on the nature of the traumatic events, the patient’s particular response, and applying systematically various procedures to remedy that response. My guess is that a lot more study is needed before we will have developed effective treatments. The author makes no comment about the implications of successful use of this social approach being independent of a physiological intervention.
5. While this comment will undoubtedly sound intolerant, I see this article as representative of what is passed off today as expertise, even (shockingly to me) in the Scientific American. By including a diagram of the brain and citing some irrelevant research the author promotes a dubious viewpoint that is based on bogus material. We need to provide the public with better information about what we know and what we dont know in this area.
Allan M. Leventhal, PhD
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, American University
Mr. Stix has not done his due diligence regarding what he calls "debriefings" (Be All That You Can Be, para.1-2). Ten years ago a non-controversy arose from poor research using an ill-defined (or undefined) intervention tagged with that term. Not aligned with any sound model of crisis intervention, this "research" found its way into the Cochran Reviews, where it has ignorantly been used to malign an effective model (CISM), which has a rarely used, group-only, tightly ordered intervention called Critical Incident Stress Debriefing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Psychologists and aid workers who descend on a disaster scene have often intervened with a technique called critical incident stress debriefing." This does not describe people using a proven model who are working as a unit in an Incident Command Structure. These loose cannons ARE dangerous and unethical.
Many psychologists have never taken the time to understand the difference, and continue to spout misinformation, as Mr. Stix has.
So lucid, succinct, and persuasive; thank you.
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