Can Oppression Create PTSD?

Does prolonged oppression cause post traumatic stress disorder---PTSD? I have probing this question for several months; I am increasingly convinced that the answer is, YES, especially after discovering a book titled Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (2005) by Joy DeGruy who has a doctorate in social work. In her opinion, PTSD and PTSS are cousins in the mental health field.

For the last four years, I have been trying to understand a puzzling Bible verse---Exodus 6:9. In Exodus 6:1-8, God plainly and directly says that he is going to deliver the Hebrew slaves from Egyptian bondage. Moses reports this exceedingly good news to the people of Israel. What was their reaction? I would have thought that 6:9 might have read something like the following: "With a tremendous shout, the people, with one voice, praised God for their coming deliverance." But, instead, the people reacted this way: "They didn't even hear him---they were that beaten down in spirit by the harsh slave conditions." (The Message)

In the RSV, the people are described as "broken in spirit." Obviously, something very traumatic had happened to the Hebrew slaves if they were unable to believe a direct message from God. Note that it was not just a few isolated individuals who were traumatized, but the people as a whole; in other words, mass PTOD---post traumatic oppression disorder.

In previous chapters in Exodus, slavery is described as cruel and ruthless; this was prolonged oppression, generations of oppressions; great grandfathers had been oppressed, also grandfathers and fathers; sons faced oppression as well as grandsons. Nobody knew anything but the unbroken agony of oppression. According to the Hebrew scholar, Thomas Hanks, oppression crushes, humiliates, animalizes, impoverishes, enslaves and kills persons created in the image of God. Oppression not only smashes the body, it also crushes the spirit.

Slowly it dawned upon me that oppression could cause PTSD or PTOD; this is my invented term to focus not only on past oppression (slavery) but also current systems of oppression.

Then I read this description of life in the Mississippi Delta in an article by Nikole Hannah-Jones in the August 15, 2014 issue of The Week titled "Ghosts of the Freedom Summer." Nikole, now living in Waterloo, Iowa, wrote:

"My dad never once [over a period of 50 years] had taken us to the state of his birth. Not for family reunions or funerals. Not for graduations or holidays. . . . [they] have no desire to speak of the daily degradations they'd faced at the height of Jim Crow." Sounds like a case of PTSD---a refusal to revisit the pain, the trauma of their horrible past.

I had previously concluded, after reading the book Slavery and Social Death by Harvard historical sociologist Orlando Patterson, that oppression can cause not only physical death but also psychological death (broken spirits) and social death (broken social institutions such as marriage and family).

One of the reasons to label oppression as the cause of PTSD is to explain that the widespread dysfunction among the urban, black poor is not the result of personal or cultural flaws, but it is the severe damage caused by powerful outside forces. We now recognize that wartime PTSD is not caused by an individual soldier's flaws or weaknesses, but by the hell of war---an external force.  For the oppressed, prolonged oppression is also hell.

In highly individualistic America, we tend to hold the individual person responsible for her/his flawed of dysfunctional behavior. As a result, the majority of white Americans blame blacks for the dysfunctions of the ghetto. Possibly the use of the PTSD or PTOD theory will clarify that oppression (slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, the racial wealth gap) is the primary cause of these dysfunctions.

The Mayo Clinic defines PTSD as "a mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event---either experiencing it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety about the event." DeGruy describes post traumatic slave syndrome as having these characteristics: "enduring injury, residual impacts of generations of slavery, multigenerational trauma, absence of opportunity to heal, no access to the benefits, privileges of society, vacant esteem, feelings of hopelessness, propensity for anger and violence, internalized racism, learned helplessness, physical, psychological and spiritual injury, self-hatred."

Are white theologians guilty of theological malpractice for their failure to engage the extensive (555 OT references to oppression) biblical teaching on oppression? Are white pastors guilty of criminal neglect by failing to preach about oppression? By failing to stop segregation in the church? Has this tragic omission contributed to ongoing PTOD among blacks?

Does PTOD exist in today's urban ghettoes; if so, only among a few individuals or on a large scale? Does PTOD exist on today's Indian reservations; if so, only on a small scale or on a large scale? Does PTOD occur in Haiti; if so, only on a small scale or a large scale?

If PTOD exists today, does Christian conversion take care of the problem? Does church? Or does Christian education? If not, what do we need to add to the HCDF ministry?

It is probably useless to argue about which is worse, PTSD or PTOD; both are horrible. But I would like to point out that in America PTOD has gone on for hundreds of years against American blacks, that it has affected a whole ethnic group, directly or indirectly, on a mass scale, not just a small minority of one ethnic group.

In rereading Black Rage (1968) which was written by two black psychiatrists, William Grier and Price Cobbs, I am all the more convinced that PTOD is real and pervasive in the black community. According to Senator Fred Harris, the root cause "is the unwillingness of white Americans to accept Negroes as fellow human beings." Despite some significant progress, "so little has changed." "The practice of slavery stopped over a hundred years ago, but the minds of our [white] citizens have never been freed."

Grier and Cobbs write that black rage "grows out of oppression and capricious cruelty." "White Americans do not understand what their role has been and still is in causing black rage." In addition, Grier and Cobbs state that "there is enduring grief in being made to feel inferior. . . . Persisting to this day [and in 2014] is an attitude, shared by blacks and whites alike, that blacks are inferior. This belief permeates every facet of this country and it is the etiological agent from which has developed the national sickness."

Three more quotations from Black Rage:

"The reality of being alternately attacked, ignored, then singled out for some cruel and undeserved punishment must extract its toll. That penalty may be a premature aging and an early death in some black people. To be regarded always as subhuman is a stultifying experience."

"America has waxed rich and powerful in large measure on the backs of black laborers. . . . It has become a violent, pitiless nation, hard and calculating, whose moments of generosity are only brief intervals in a ferocious narrative of life."

"The white man has crushed all but the life from blacks from the time they came to these shores to this very day." Smashed in body, broken in spirit; no wonder PTOD is widespread.

For those who would like more professional analysis of PTSD, I recommend googling the National Center for PTSD. The American Psychiatric Association added this diagnosis in 1980: "From an historical perspective, the significant change ushered in by the PTSD concept was the stipulation that the etiological agent was outside the individual (i.e., a traumatic event) rather than an inherent individual weakness (i.e., a traumatic neurosis)."

An October 17, 2014 revision: Cancel PTOD; instead, I now prefer PTOS. The S stands for syndrome which means "together, concurrence, a group of symptoms, a variety of etiological factors." Or for this theory, a set of factors, a series of traumatic, sometimes terrifying events. PTSD, according to Mayo Clinic, focuses on the enduring trauma caused by a single terrifying event such as a death in war or a rape. Oppression may include such terrifying events, but the total experience of a system of oppression such as slavery would be ongoing trauma, even a lifetime of varying degrees of trauma, often rape, severe beatings or lynchings; in other words, unending agony. So blow after blow after blow is imposed a people, an ethnic group; the cumulative damage is enormous.

I could have easily kept Joy DeGruy's PTSS---post traumatic slavery syndrome---except I felt that most whites might quickly dismiss it as an interesting theory, but irrelevant and dated since slavery ended 150 years ago. For me, the word oppression captures both the systems of oppression of the past such as slavery and legal segregation and the current systems of oppression such as the mass incarceration of young black and Latino males and the 20-1 racial wealth gap.

So PTOS has the following in common with PTSD: powerful, damaging external forces, and victims experience long-lasting trauma. PTOS is different from PTSD in that there are a set of factors, a series of events, a lifetime of trauma, not just a single, terrifying event.