“Stockholm Syndrome” Was Invented by Police to Discredit a Female Hostage
14th September 2024
Nothing exposes the mythical thinking behind learned helplessness better than Stockholm syndrome: a diagnosis assigned to women who show affection for their captors, and a distrust of authority. It’s a classic throw-away line we use to describe the mental condition of domestic abuse victims, but it’s also a term that’s still taken seriously by some psychologists. ‘A classic example [of Stockholm syndrome] is domestic violence,’ says Oxford psychologist Jennifer Wild, ‘when someone – typically a woman – has a sense of dependency on her partner and stays with him.’
But Stockholm syndrome – a dubious pathology with no diagnostic criteria – is riddled with misogyny and founded on a lie. 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.