But that doesn’t stop armchair psychiatrists from misapplying the idea to things like women in abusive relationships.īut Stockholm Syndrome is not the same as abuse, in fact, it’s a potentially very flawed idea that fails to encapsulate all the complexities of human emotion, survival responses, and psychology. Stockholm Syndrome is not a recognized diagnosis or disorder, and there are no accepted criteria for diagnosing it. The hostage situation was mismanaged and most importantly, Nils Bejerot, the psychiatrist who invented the term, never spoke to the woman at the center of it and seems to have coined the term to make himself and the authorities look better.Īnd it really calls into question how we think of Stockholm Syndrome and how there are so many phrases and ideas in our culture that we don’t examine enough, especially for the subtle ways they undermine women’s agency. The phrase was reported to have been coined by criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot.īut, as we can see in the excerpt in the tweet above, there was a lot of sexism at work in the coining of the term. Stockholm Syndrome was born by way of explanation. Six days later when the stand-off ended, it became evident that the victims had formed some kind of positive relationship with their captors. It was 23 August 1973 when the four were taken hostage in the Kreditbanken by 32-year-old career-criminal Jan-Erik Olsson – who was later joined at the bank by a former prison mate. The BBC gives the following quick rundown which is the standard story: We apply the concept that a person (usually a woman) might fall in love (or deeply sympathize) with their captor to a lot of media, and Beauty and the Beast has become such a common example it’s nearly cliche to call out the idea.Īnd culturally, we don’t go that much deeper into the term. Stockholm Syndrome is something that’s become a pretty well-known idea, at least since the first time some of us heard about in reference to Sophie Marceau falling in love with her kidnapper Robert Carlyle in 1999’s Bond film The World is Not Enough. I actually cannot believe this origin story for “Stockholm Syndrome” which is basically just a “myth invented to discredit women victims of violence by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority” /DN62JezT95
Twitter user Sarah Mohammed shared the following excerpt from the book See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence by Jess Hill and it’s completely realigning how many of us understand Stockholm Syndrome. Sometimes, very rarely, social media opens your eyes to something you didn’t know or had never really examined, and today that thing was … Stockholm Syndrome.
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