[meigwilym]

I'm no expert, but wasn't Stockholm Syndrome debunked?

My understanding is that the response to the hostage taking was so incompetent that the hostages trusted the kidnappers more than the police. One of them was expected to "die at her post" by a bank executive. She refused to testify against them for these reasons rather than any sympathy to their cause.

[praptak]

Well this article seems to classify it as pure bullshit: https://www.stadafa.com/2020/12/stockholm-syndrome-discredit...

"The psychiatrist who invented it, Nils Bejerot, never spoke to the woman he based it on, never bothered to ask her why she trusted her captors more than the authorities. More to the point, during the Swedish bank heist that inspired the syndrome, Bejerot was the psychiatrist leading the police response. He was the authority that Kristin Enmark – the first woman diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome – distrusted."

"On the radio, Enmark criticized the police, and singled out Bejerot. In response, and without once speaking to her, Bejerot dismissed her comments as the product of a syndrome he made up: ‘Norrmalmstorg syndrome’ (later renamed Stockholm syndrome). The fear Enmark felt towards the police was irrational, Bejerot explained, caused by the emotional or sexual attachment she had with her captors. Bejerot’s snap diagnosis suited the Swedish media; they were suspicious of Enmark, who ‘did not appear as traumatized as she ought to be.’ "

At best,this syndrome was described based on one situation, not scientific research.

[jbandela1]

Maybe we should have a Bejerot Syndrome.

This is where an “expert” impugns the intellect or morality of the people who disagree with them instead of trying to understand the very real reasons why.

[pessimizer]

Or more precisely, the mental health of the people who disagree with them.

Knowing that the person who came up with Stockholm Syndrome was the very same person who the hostages sided with the bank robbers against makes it look a lot like drapetomania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania).

[portmanteur]

I can think of a few examples over the past 3-8 years where this would be a useful syndrome to have named and in the popular memory.

Oh well, Stockholm Syndrome is catchier.

[praptak]

That certainly sounds tempting but we should struggle to have less poorly substantiated syndromes, not more :-)

[beschizza]

Perhaps Bejerot Syndrome could refer to the pop-science tendency to gather and link rational objections to a proposal, policy or practice so they can be posed as pathologically associated symptoms.

[bratgpttamer]

Agreed - but, isn't character assassination a classic technique of authorities employed against those who disagree with them?

[zgluck]

One of them was expected to "die at her post" by a bank executive.

I wasn't a bank executive, it was the the social democratic prime minister Olof Palme.

During a phone call he asked one of the hostages: "wouldn′t it be nice to die at your post?"

https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/591659

(https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/03/the-murder-of-swedish-prim...)

[joncrane]

Wow, this adds some context to his assassination, which is still one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of our time.

[delecti]

If he was that big of a jackass, maybe his murder wasn't an assassination at all. Maybe someone was just fed up with his shit.

[philwelch]

I think the murder of a prime minister is an assassination by definition.

[delecti]

I think it depends. The two main definitions I'm seeing for "assassination" are either: any intentional murder (so basically any murder is an assassination), or specifically any politically motivated murder (so a jilted lover killing the president wouldn't be an assassination, but killing your local HOA president could be).

[philwelch]

People seem to consistently refer to John Hinckley’s shooting of President Reagan as an “assassination attempt” despite the fact that Hinckley’s motive was a delusional belief that this would impress Jodie Foster. And we still don’t know the exact motive of the JFK assassination, though everyone has their theories.

[meigwilym]

Thanks for the correction. I don't think I would have believed my memory even if I had remembered that fact correctly!

[aredox]

Yes, Stockholm syndrome is a toxic lie, a mix of mysoginy, covering up police incompetence and Swedish "holier-than-thou" attitude.

https://www.stadafa.com/2020/12/stockholm-syndrome-discredit...

[3cats-in-a-coat]

Stockholm syndrome is an example of a phenomenon that is pervasive in society and nature in general and a basic consequence of trying to adapt to your environment. We can nitpick forever the specific Stockholm events, but they're just a noisy example of a pattern, not an ideal MODEL of the pattern.

[escapedmoose]

But the distinction between the apparent pattern and its underlying cause is important. If the cause of this method of “trying to adapt to your environment” isn’t actually some bizarre psychological paradox after all, that fact has important implications for how we treat people in these scenarios.

[3cats-in-a-coat]

In general anything we call "paradox" is something we don't understand. A paradox is apparent contradiction of facts and their logical, rational relationship. But contradictions don't exist out there.

Reportedly the syndrome "occurs in 8% of kidnap victims", by FBI stats. Not sure how they measure that, but seems plausible. Of course when forced to act against your will, you're defiant. Fight or flight. That's what happens most of the time. Except it's not so simple.

There's a fuller description of the strategies known as "Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn" (I guess it was super important to to keep the F-s, hehe).

We see the Freeze response in nature, deer stuck in headlights, animals pretending to be dead when attacked, and so on. We can see this response in children with violent parents. They can't run and hide, nor fight. They freeze.

Fawn is basically the "Stockholm syndrome":

- Over-agreement

- Trying to be overly helpful

- Primary concern with making the abuser happy

This 8% figure with kidnapping seems to be low because the "Fawn" adaptation takes time to develop. A kidnapping is sudden and unexpected. No time to adapt. But there are abusive situations when there is plenty of time to adapt.

We can see this in cults, in abusive families, autocratic companies, it's pervasive in fascist regimes, i.e. Jews policing, hating and attacking Jews, etc.

Fawn is the default adaptation when an abuser is abusive over a long period of time, gradually going from non-abusive to abusive, like in an abusive marriage, from honeymoon to everyday scandals. The victims seek to align to an increasingly lopsided point of balance by changing themselves. And over time, it can become absurd.

[philwelch]

> A kidnapping is sudden and unexpected. No time to adapt. But there are abusive situations when there is plenty of time to adapt.

To wit, the second most prominent supposed case of Stockholm Syndrome was the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, who was supposedly held captive by the SLA terrorists and abused for a protracted period of time before she started helping them rob banks.

[aredox]

It's not. The proof? There is no serious study on it, despite its "obviousness" and "pervasiveness".

Kapos, collaborators or hostages joining the cause of their captors are not a "syndrome" of people "falling in love" or "bonding" with their captors. Patty Hearst was just convinced of the cause of the SLA - and she tried to get out of jail by using that card. She was just neither bright not honest - a spoiled brat jumping on an adventure that turned bad.

[cstejerean]

> One of the hostages even became engaged to one of her captors

Was that also because of distrusting the police?

[makeitdouble]

> She had criticized the police for pointing guns at the convicts while the hostages were in the line of fire and she had told news outlets that one of the captors tried to protect the hostages from being caught in the crossfire

So yes, she became engaged to someone who tried to save her life from the police.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome#Stockholm_b...

[throwaway290]

> So yes, she became engaged to someone who tried to save her life from the police.

Uhm, after that "someone" joined a gang and took her hostage in order to steal money? If that's logical that sounds like a problem, whether theory is shoddy science or not the thing is real if even you, not victim, fall into that delusion.

People can be thankful to someone who improves things even if that someone creates the horrible situation in the first place. It's a problem and in politics too. Give people more comfortable life and they praise you even if your bad policies are the reason they famished previously. We remember good stuff and forget stuff that bums us out. Your comment exemplified that mistake.

[sparky_z]

It may be a mistake, but does it that make it a "syndrome"?

[throwaway290]

where did I call it a syndrome?

If you justify her marrying the guy because he saved her from police, and you completely sideline that he needed to save her from police because he took her hostage during robbery and police came for that criminal, sorry that's just idiotic.

You can justify marrying the person who put you in direct danger of death for whatever irrational things like emotion, sexual attraction whatever, but you must acknowledge that it's highly illogical and quite worthy of a close look, if the original stockholm syndrome study is complete bullshit then someone else should do a better job at describing this bias.

Edit: thankfully, it turns out all that about marrying the hostage taker is false. (The logic in comment I replied to remains stupid though)

[cwmma]

According to Wikipedia:

> He (Olsson) later got engaged to a woman who was not, despite what some state, one of the former hostages

that being said the other hostage taker, Olofsson:

> He went on to meet the hostage Kristin Enmark several times, and their families became friends.

[meigwilym]

As I said, I'm no expert. I read somewhere that it was a sexist response to this woman's criticisms.

Wikipedia states:

"He later got engaged to a woman who was not, despite what some state, one of the former hostages."

I think the whole article can be viewed with a healthy scepticism.

[marginalia_nu]

Most of these supposed syndromes seem fairly questionable.

[tokai]

Almost all of them just seems like first psycotic episode brought about by a novel stressful environment.

[cguess]

"feelings of dizziness and being lightheaded" sounds much more like a tourist was walking around Italy in the summer with a heavy backpack and not drinking enough water after getting off an airplane and probably impinging too much wine at dinner the night before.

[jjkaczor]

Same with any hotter climate tourist location and 'mysterious syndrome'.

Also combine with perhaps a little change in their stomach biome from drinking different water and/or eating different dairy products, making them more easily dehydrated.

[cguess]

People tend to either over or under indulge while traveling too (I always lose weight when I'm on the road myself) and that's never awesome in either direction

[isleyaardvark]

The wiki entry for Paris syndrome debunks the entry in the article. The article seems low quality.

[johanneskanybal]

Watch ”Clark” on Netflix for a fun take on events. But basically imagine a charming sociopath bankrobber back in innocent 70’s in Sweden.

With the twist that the bank robbing that gave name to the phrase was made by someone psychotic and the friendly bank robber got called in by the prime minister to negotiate.