Fear itself

ONE night in 2009 Jennifer Hopper and her fiancée, Teresa Butz, woke to find a man standing over them with a knife in his hand. He raped them both and killed Ms Butz with a stab through the heart. Ms Hopper was left with scars from slash wounds to her throat and arms. Her mental wounds healed more slowly. She became petrified of the dark and her sleep was disturbed by nightmares of intruders. A tap on the shoulder left her terrified. She could not get into her car: during the attack her worst fear had been that their assailant would drive them somewhere they would never be found.

Accounts of debilitating fear after trauma date back to the Trojan wars. In the 19th century survivors of train crashes were diagnosed with “railway spine” because doctors thought their hysteria was caused by compression of the backbone. In the first world war it was known as shell shock, soldier’s heart or battle fatigue. Not until soldiers returned from the Vietnam war with the same symptoms of hyper-vigilance, flashbacks and nightmares was the disorder truly taken seriously. In 1980 an umbrella term was coined: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).