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Promised release, dead within days
Robert was the best friend of Harold Kushner, who later told the story. Both men were prisoners of war in Hanoi, and both were down to about ninety-five pounds. Their captors kept Robert going by telling him he was first on the list to be released in December, particularly if he cooperated and told them what he had done during the war.
December first came around, and Robert was not released. He shriveled up, and within a few days he was dead.
Kushner told this to Martin Seligman, a psychologist who was studying what happens to people who lose control. His interest ran to children who are abused and communities caught in poverty, and also to adults who have done well all their lives and then have control taken away.
Why can losing hope be physically deadly?
In 1942, physiologist Walter Cannon published a paper titled Voodoo Death, which gathered reports of people who died after believing they had been cursed. He proposed that extreme fear could overdrive the sympathetic nervous system. Military physicians who treated American prisoners after the Korean War described a condition they called give-up-itis, in which men withdrew from others and died without a clear physical cause.
How do captors use promised release dates?
In 1957, sociologist Albert Biderman published an analysis of how American airmen held prisoner in Korea were pressured by their captors. His summary of the methods became known as the chart of coercion. It listed isolation, monopolizing perception, and occasional indulgences, meaning small favors granted at unpredictable moments. Amnesty International reproduced the chart in its 1970s reporting on torture.
How does lack of control affect the body?
In the early 1970s, psychologist Jay Weiss ran experiments at Rockefeller University using pairs of rats that received identical electric shocks. One rat could end the shocks by turning a wheel, and the other had no way to stop them. The rats with no control developed more stomach ulcers than the rats with control, even though both received the same shocks.
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