MOST of us have come across the term Stockholm Syndrome at some point, whether in a true crime documentary or a drama series.
It especially gets thrown about a lot when people discuss why someone refuses to leave a terrible relationship.
But the story behind it is considerably stranger than most people realise, and the science behind it is considerably thinner than its reputation suggests.
Is Stockholm Syndrome actually a made-up condition?
Verdict:
TRUE
As a formal medical diagnosis, Stockholm Syndrome does not exist. It never has. But the psychological response it tries to describe is real, and that is what makes the whole story so complicated.
It all started with a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden in August 1973, when a man named Jan-Erik Olsson took four bank employees hostage in a vault at gunpoint.
Over the next six days, the hostages started defending their captors, turned against the police trying to rescue them and after their release refused to testify against the robbers in court.
On the surface, it looked like textbook psychological bonding with their captors. But the hostages told a very different story.
One hostage, Kristin Enmark, called the Swedish Prime Minister directly during the standoff to say she trusted the robbers and feared the police would get everyone killed.
She had good reason to worry. Police drilled holes through the vault wall to photograph the scene, triggering one of the captors to open fire and wound a forensic officer.
The police then delivered a getaway car to the bank as demanded but sent it without keys, an error that visibly agitated the already armed robbers inside the vault.
When Enmark pleaded directly with Prime Minister Olof Palme to negotiate, he told her the hostages should be willing to die as heroes for Sweden's political stance against making deals with criminals.
Enmark later told reporters that police were acting incompetently and that the criminals in contrast were behaving more rationally than the authorities throughout.
From her perspective, the authorities did not seem to have the hostages' best interest at heart and this forced them to negotiate for their own survival.
The psychiatrist advising the police, Nils Bejerot, dismissed all of this without ever interviewing any of the hostages, who were all women except for one man, publicly labelled them as emotionally irrational, and told the press they had been psychologically bonded to their captors. He called it Stockholm Syndrome, and the name stuck.
The problem was that Bejerot's label was never subjected to any serious scientific scrutiny.
Stockholm Syndrome does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the main reference guide used by psychiatrists worldwide, nor in its global equivalent, the International Classification of Diseases.
No doctor anywhere in the world can officially diagnose someone with Stockholm Syndrome because it is not a recognised medical condition.
A landmark review published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica finds that most of what passes for evidence is based on media reports of high-profile cases rather than clinical research, that there are no validated diagnostic criteria, and that the scientific evidence base is remarkably thin for something so widely cited.
An FBI study finds that only around 5% to 8% of kidnapping victims show behaviour consistent with Stockholm Syndrome, suggesting the phenomenon is far rarer in real life than popular culture implies.
The psychological experiences the term tries to describe are better explained by conditions that already exist and are properly validated.
Trauma bonding, a recognised condition in which a person develops an emotional attachment to an abuser as a survival mechanism, explains the same behaviour with actual diagnostic criteria behind it. Post-traumatic stress disorder captures much of the rest.
It is worth noting that trauma bonding typically develops over months or years, while the apparent bonding in the 1973 case happened within six days under acute life-threatening conditions, which some researchers argue justifies a separate clinical framework.
The scientific community has yet to agree, and without validated diagnostic criteria the debate remains open.
What is not in dispute is that Stockholm Syndrome was named by a psychiatrist who dismissed the hostages' own accounts without speaking to them, then made famous by tabloids and Hollywood, and has survived for more than 50 years on its own mythology.
The experiences of people trapped in captivity or abusive relationships are real and deserve serious clinical attention. The name, however, has always been more pop culture than peer-reviewed science.
Source:
1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
4. https://www.time.com/5874808/
5. https://www.jetir.org/papers/
6. https://www.history.com/
7. https://www.aljazeera.com/
