LAST week鈥檚 terrorist attacks in London evoked in me an awkward sense of d茅j脿-vu. I live and work as a psychiatrist in Jerusalem, where over the past decade terrorist bombs became part of everyday life. Eviscerated buses, screaming sirens and the sticky scent of burnt bodies are among the basic repertoire of my patients鈥� nightmares.
I know well the feeling of utmost improbability that such attacks can create: the dissonance between horror on one side of a street and, say, a poster advertising a holiday destination or beauty cream on the other. This juxtaposition of the incongruous and the familiar, the veneer of self-composure that many people show, and the obvious innocence of the victims add together to give an extreme sense of the surreal.
How can Londoners expect to deal with this in the days and weeks to come? Research has consistently shown that, contrary to popular belief, people behave with restrained purposefulness and mutual support during disasters. After each act of terror, it took about two weeks for the streets of Jerusalem to again be filled with people. Shops in Jaffa Street, which was bombed repeatedly, remained open throughout the hostilities. Those of us who live in Jerusalem learned to 鈥渢erritorialise鈥� the threat, identifying patterns in the attacks, relying on our instincts and judgement, and reorganising our lives such that every day of living under terror comprised a small personal victory, rather than defeat. Regardless of how accurate our 鈥渇ear maps鈥� and predictions of threat were, they served us well by allowing us to carry on living relatively smoothly. Indeed, they left space for us to actually enjoy life.
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This sense of security is what terrorism seeks to disrupt by making people fearful of when and where the next attack will happen. Here we can learn much from the science of animal behaviour. You can instil in free-roaming animals a permanent sense that predators are imminent by scattering their odours in unpredictable ways. This gives the sense that no territory is safe and nothing the animal does can effectively protect it from the threat. In a similar way, terrorism is an attack on our perception of reality. Randomly attacking improbable victims is designed to build a sense of permanent threat and disrupt the normal pattern of life. Furthermore, images of horror, be it a beheading in Iraq or scattered human remains in London, lead to a perception of incongruous novelty which our brains may have difficulty classifying and processing. Grotesque images that evoke particular fear and revulsion, such as mangled or children鈥檚 bodies, amplify the effects of terrorism. For this reason there is a strong argument for not broadcasting them.
What is going on in our brains at such times? Fear and horror can leave enhanced memory traces, mostly in those areas of the brain involved in the processing of emotion, warning and alarm. These can result in conditioned responses that are involuntarily triggered when the person is reminded of the event. For some people, life may become dominated by these conditioned fear responses: this is post-traumatic stress disorder. However, in most people exposed to terror these early fear responses subside, or may never even develop. They can recuperate and reflect about the events they have witnessed, whereas those for whom any reminder evokes uncontrollable emotions avoid such reflection. This makes it impossible for the fear pathways and the more developed areas in their brain to interact, which is essential for healing.
鈥淎fter each act of terror it took two weeks for the streets of Jerusalem to fill with people鈥�
In Jerusalem, despite the trauma, many factors have helped maintain a relatively balanced perception of reality. Firstly, buildings and streets were immediately repaired so that the centre of the city did not look like a scene of destruction. Not every community has resources to do this, but London certainly does. Secondly, survivors and their families were given social, medical and financial support, so that being hurt by terror was not the beginning of social drift. Thirdly, and most importantly, the media were consistently accurate, reliable, timely and specific, so that by and large the people trusted them. As Londoners will have realised, when the media announced the location, timing and extent of the attacks, they were not only breaking bad news, they were also giving reassurance to people whose family and friends could not possibly have been at risk.
Finally, do not underestimate the importance of words. Human experience is embedded in cognition and language, and images of terror are immediately wrapped in words: the words of survivors, the anxious telephone calls to friends, statements from police, the narratives of politicians, the mutterings of families and clergy at the graves of young victims or around hospital beds. The Jerusalem experience has taught us to listen to every word, weigh each carefully, and live within the complexity of competing over-expressed interpretations of what has happened and what it might mean.