Mental health professionals in Israel faced the difficult task of helping hostages freed or released from Gaza in recovering from their trauma, and is akin to getting someone stripped of their humanity and rebuilding them from the ground up, Lucian Tatsa-Laur, the former head of the IDF mental health department, told Tamar Uriel-Beeri on The Jerusalem Post Podcast.
Tatsa-Laur described how the IDF didn’t have much experience in treating hostages before November 2023, when around 100 hostages were freed from Gaza as part of a ceasefire deal. What they did know did not adequately prepare them for the mental state the freed hostages would be in when they returned, shaped by the traumatic experiences they suffered since October 7.
“It’s very, very difficult, but I will try to be a descriptive about what the state of mind of somebody who has been held hostage is,” Tatsa-Laur explained. “He is stripped of all his humanity and all of his being. You need to try to imagine that from somebody who [feels they are] worth something and has meaning life, you are reduced to somebody whose life could end in a flinch. You could say something, you could do something – actually, you could do anything, and your life is over. It’s worth nothing. And if you add to that that you are detached from all the people that that you know, and you are starved, and you are also manipulated psychologically and physically… You’re in very, very deprived state, which I don’t think we can really understand.
“It’s like being reduced to nothing at all. And I think that one of the most difficult challenges as a psychiatrist or a psychologist, is to get somebody who was reduced to nothing and all and making him human again.”
For many who came back, they did not have their old normal lives to return to, as so much had changed.
“Even when they came back, the reality was totally different. A lot of them did not have any families anymore. A lot of them did not have any homes to get back to. They’re not getting back to a reality that they knew. They’re building themselves anew,” Tatsa-Laur said.
Living in survival mode and with survivor’s guilt
Many of the hostages also were running on their base survival instincts, Tatsa-Laur explained.
“Even though now your life is not threatened, you behave as though you are exactly in the same spot as if your life have been threatened,” he noted. “As long as your mind believes that you are still in the state of trauma, that you are still being threatened, and you live each and every day, it’s very, very debilitating. And we’ve seen it. We’ve seen it with children behaving as a babies because and not being able to function. Of adult people neglecting themselves, not being able to work, and always thinking that they are still in the state of captivity.”
Then there is the added issue of survivor’s guilt, something very common in survivors of trauma or those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“Their mind will say to them, ‘Why did I survive while my peer or my friends which were with me in captivity did not survive? I am probably wrong. I’m probably bad because of that,’ and that guilt keeps gnawing on you and growing and becoming a hindrance to your ability to grow out of the things,” Tatsa-Laur said.
“And it’s a very, very real thing. We see it in soldiers, but we see it also in survivors of torture and [the freed] hostages. So when we treat these people, we need to deal also with the survivor guilt. And we need to deal with the more mundane things, like feeding them, dressing them and so on.”
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