By Laurie Barkin
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle
November 23, 2004
Iris Chang, the thirty-six-year-old author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, had spent more than a decade buried inside the experiences of those who survived the Japanese army’s massacre of three hundred thousand of their countrymen in Nanjing in 1937. More recently, she had been interviewing survivors of the Bataan Death March. After listening to the testimony of an American veteran in Kentucky, she suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized for three days. Back at her home in the Bay Area, even with medication, she ended her own life on November 9.
Compassion fatigue. Secondary trauma. Vicarious trauma. These are the terms commonly used to describe the disorientation that overtakes a person of Iris Chang’s compassionate temperament after she has borne witness to inhuman cruelty inflicted by human beings on other human beings. After five years of working as a psychiatric trauma nurse consultant, I myself began having unending nightmares, tightness in the chest, and a steadily mounting fear for my own children’s safety. I attended a conference on psychological trauma, and there I heard, for the first time, the term vicarious trauma. I began to understand my own symptoms — and to understand that I needed to step away from the work for a while.
Trauma specialists use the word dose to refer to the impact of a traumatic event upon a person who has been exposed to it. Recent research lets us describe the changes that occur in the human brain in response to psychological trauma. Even secondary exposure — and especially the heavy, sustained dose of the kind Iris Chang absorbed — can leave clear, measurable changes in the brain. Police, firefighters, psychotherapists, journalists, and front-line medical workers are all in the same high-risk group.
There are workable treatments. They work better when one steps in before the symptoms appear. They include a supportive workplace, a stable home, regular exercise, a balance between work and rest, and time spent with friends — especially the kind of friends who can make you laugh.
The people who mourn Iris Chang say of her that she was someone who felt the pain of others as her own, and that she was tireless and would not let go of a task once she had taken it up. Some have said: for Iris, nothing was undoable. Perhaps that is exactly why, faced with the evil of the world, Iris Chang gave herself, without holding back, to the work of changing it. I can imagine how the cries of the wronged dead must have kept her from sleep, kept her from food; how each survivor’s testimony pulled her further in; how, in order to set their bottomless pain into words, she made herself carry what no one ought to have to carry; how she shouldered the suffering of others so that we might learn from it and become better people.
The only problem is that we do not want to listen. We do not want to hear, we do not want to believe. To speak of one’s inner feelings has, in this country, always been treated as something embarrassing. We would sooner give people pills, or get them drunk, than open our hearts to them. We have not been taught how to attend to the emotional needs of others. When someone we know expresses pain or grief, we feel uneasy. We avoid the situation, because we are afraid we will say the wrong thing, or because we are afraid we will lose our own footing. But recognition, care, and consolation are exactly what those who have witnessed need. At times, even loving family and faithful friends are not enough to pull a person back from the depths of someone else’s pain.
The life of Iris Chang lit up the lives of many — and at the same time it cost her her own. Like the firefighters who ran toward the towers on September 11, she searched, sleepless and tireless, through the ruins of a tragedy not her own. We need to nurture the kind of people who, like her, throw their lives into the pursuit of truth without looking after their own safety. We must allow them to rest. We must praise them. We must listen to what they say. And we must catch them, before the abyss of despair pulls them down.
Laurie Barkin is a clinical psychiatric nurse specialist at work on a book about survivors of psychological trauma.
- (Translated jointly by Jian Shuhui and Ma Haining.)
