Screen Trauma

Abstract

Shortly after the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster in Sheffield, England, sixteen people brought actions claiming to suffer a “nervous shock” as a result of learning from the media about the fatal human crush that occurred during a soccer match. The plaintiffs, most of whom were relatives of the victims, demanded compensations as secondary victims, arguing that their injury was within the “immediate aftermath”—a category recognized by British law as having been involved in the consequences of a tragic event. The court rejected the claim, but not before speculating on the hypothetical possibility of a traumatic live broadcast. Numerous claims for psychiatric injury had been filed prior to this case, yet this is probably one of the first to consider whether media could cause trauma to viewers, and consequently be compensable by law. Were such a case to be heard today, however, it might find support from recent developments in psychiatric research. For there is now a growing acceptance among mental health experts that trauma could transfer, under certain conditions, through visual media. Referring to notions such as “distant trauma,” “traumatic media exposure,” and “vicarious traumatization,” clinicians and researchers are now willing to acknowledge that witnessing disastrous events through the media could cause a reaction that complies with existing PTSD clinical criteria. How did this development come about? How does such mediated trauma manifest itself? What are its social, legal, and moral consequences? And what are the implications for our understanding of both media and trauma? These are the questions this chapter sets out to explore. Psychiatry has long been in the business of understanding how external violence affects mental processes. While operating under various nomenclatures, modern conceptions of trauma have dovetailed with modern developments in technology and warfare. As already noted earlier in this book, trauma is a central theme in the grand narrative of the shock of modernity.