The human mind has many ways of dealing with traumatic events that are happening around it, ranging from denial to aggression. The former seemed to be the case with a nine-year-old girl in Mumbai on Monday night, when she was woken up with the sound of her father suffocating her mother to death.
According to reports, the girl — Samiksha — woke up in the middle of the night and saw her father sitting on her mother’s chest with a pillow on her face.
She told police that she pretended to be asleep because she was afraid that he might harm her as well. The father then slit her mother’s throat with a knife and tried hanging himself with a sari, but it tore.
Samiksha’s father then took a dupatta and used it to hang himself from the ceiling. In the middle of all this, Samiksha said she fell asleep and only remembered to alert her neighbours when she woke up the next morning.
Police and neighbours have expressed shock at how, little Samiksha was able to just... slip into a deep sleep — it started off as pretending but the child claims she simply nodded off... despite the fact that her parents were lying in a pool of blood just a few feet away.
‘Fight or freeze’
Clinical psychologist Pulkit Sharma says Samiksha’s mind could have gone into a complete denial — which is in fact, built to protect us from permanent mental damage.
“Denial is a defence mechanism where the mind protects itself from being overwhelmed. When we are scared, we become immobile at times. We either fight or we freeze. Only later on, when the mind is a position to process what has happened does it start registering actual information,” he says.
But doctors admit “sleeping off” is a little strange. When faced with a threat, the brain is capable of mobilising several of the body's core defence mechanisms.
For example, it can make people move faster — it increases heart rate, sends blood into muscles, dispatches stress hormones and glucose into the bloodstream.
With Samiksha, it's a possibility that her brain "rationalised" that deep sleep was the best way to avoid harm.
"Usually, when a person witnesses a gruesome, violent act such as this, a dose of adrenaline is released and that causes increased heart rate and even breathing problems. But, with this child here, sleeping through the entire night seems to be more due to exhaustion. A child's brain processes such events much more differently than that of an adult. It's really not prepared for events as violent as this. The effects of the trauma could last longer," says K. Sivaprasad, Professor of Psychiatry, Osmania Medical College.
Treatment
Post traumatic stress impacts life in several ways. Patients have failed to create new memories, experience sudden triggers caused by certain items. Sivaprasad adds that, for Samiksha, a saree of the same colour could spark off dangerous reactions.
The experts also add that what’s important now is the kind responsive treatment that Samiksha is exposed to now, so that the incident doesn’t come back to haunt her later.
“If the child is too young, say in the age bracket of 3 to 7, it will have a disastrous emotional impact. For the child, the parents are the security net. If they are harmed, the child doesn’t have an anchor to hold on to. The child could be destroyed emotionally. To sympathise, we sometimes ask the child to recount whatever has happened, so it will help him or her to come out of the situation. This practice is wrong. You are instead making them revise it and the information is getting consolidated again,” says Dr Namita Singh, a consultant neuro psychologist, Apollo Hospitals, adding that the child should be removed from the environment immediately so it helps them to forget the incident.
“A child’s mind is fragile, so most of the time it can’t make sense of the different kinds of emotions. The impact of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is more severe and longer than in adults.” says Pulkit, adding, “At the personal level she should allow her emotions to come out and experience them and tell herself that they are normal. Generally, when we do this the impact of PTSD goes down.”
“As she grows up, she will relive the experience over and over again. This is why counselling is required,” adds Sivaprasad.
