What is the psychological toll of living under a brutal totalitarian regime for a quarter century?
To survive emotionally under such pressures and horrors requires massive psychological adaptation. Al-Sarraf says that during her visits to Iraq, she noticed a deadened quality to the personalities, a deep passivity in which any sense of internal control was surrendered to the overwhelming external pressures. “People would act as if nothing were under their control,” she recalls, “because someone else was determining their destiny and future.” Fatalism. The technical term for this is “learned helplessness,” in which negative, uncontrollable external events have been shown to create a profound and debilitating sense of fatalism. Victims of child abuse often suffer learned helplessness, which can in turn cause serious mental disorders, including anxiety and depression. For obvious reasons, learned helplessness is precisely the emotional state that a totalitarian regime would find most useful for sustaining the docility of the people and consolidating the leadership’s iron grip on power.
