When I was in graduate school, my roommate had a fear of spiders.  We were studying getting rid of fears in school, so I decided for his birthday I was going to help him get over his fear.  I went out and bought him the biggest tarantula you’ve ever seen, a female because they were bigger.  I wrapped it up and gave it to him, and it went flying when he saw what it was and it ended up on the floor.  Now, I am not fearful of spiders, but when they are the size of a border collie… it took us about 2 hours to get it off the floor and into the aquarium I bought.  Well, my roommate got used to it, letting it crawl on him unfettered.  He had a good pet and got over his fear.

Well, one night when I was avoiding statistics, I read about tarantulas and found out they have between 1000 and 1500 babies at a time, many of which the mother eats.  Now I paid $39.99 for this little bug, and when you do the multiplication, that was a lot of money and money was tight as a graduate student.  So, I decided we’d run a program called “tarantulas for tuition,” where we would mate these nasty arachnids and sell the offspring to pet stores.  We were going to mate them on New Year’s Day because we had a party the night before and many guests were sleeping over.  We figured everyone would want to see this mating exercise.  We got a male tarantula, set the lights low, and put Bolero on the boom box.  I had a little pamphlet on mating tarantulas which I thought I’d read to them in case they didn’t know what to do.  We all piled into one room to watch the conception of our new project.

We set the male tarantula into the aquarium with the female tarantula.  Immediately, the male tarantula let out a high pitched scream, turned, and ran trying to climb up the walls to get out of the aquarium.  I figured I had better read the manual to them because this didn’t look too amorous.  The first line of the manual was “make sure you fed the female before you start.”  I asked my partner when he fed the female tarantula, and he said about three weeks before.  The female went over and made a meal of the male tarantula which is something you don’t want to see a day after the reveries of a New Year’s Eve.

Undeterred, we decided to try again, except this time we had no music, no audience, and had a barrier to place between the bugs in case we the same thing happened again.  We stuffed crickets down the throat of the female tarantula to make sure it wasn’t hungry.  We set the male in the aquarium and he screeched and tried to get out.  I guess the female was just a nasty looking eight-legged thing.  We separated them again and put the male back in his own aquarium.  And he never moved again!  He never ate, would not respond to prodding, and never moved again.  He shriveled up and died over a couple of weeks.  I always thought this was my first trauma patient as I had seen the same reaction many times over the years.

Many people think during trauma reactions someone is being extra nervous or anxious, but in reality that’s only the first part.  It is usually a state where the body just shuts down. The person is real hyper at first, then goes into a shut down state as the body sort of knows it needs to either recover or to preserve resources so that it can live longer.  This is one of the things that often lawyers misread in their clients who are making claims of emotional trauma, and often represent people who are trying to fake trauma for financial gains and end up doing a lot of work with no profit.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is actually a newer diagnosis in the psychiatric/psychological repertoire.  Before that it was called battle fatigue or traumatic neurosis or even war neurosis.  But all those diagnoses sort of put the blame on the person, so the parlance changed to post-traumatic stress disorder to better define what it was and where it came from.  It wasn’t used much in the early days of the diagnosis, however when managed care came to psychology they stopped paying for certain disorders.  Everybody can claim a good trauma in their life, so people started using it a lot on insurance forms to gain reimbursement.  It wasn’t long before people began using it in court.

The diagnosis requires: an event or series of events that cause a reaction of fear of one’s life, horror or helplessness.  As an expert, what the lawyers usually try to get you on is fear of one’s life, especially in work-related trauma, which is what the highest number of lawsuits with trauma are about.  When a person starts having panic attacks and going to the hospital thinking they are having a heart attack, that would constitute a fear of one’s life, at least in psychological terms.  Then you have the helplessness and the horror which are both subjective.  In reality, when a person feels their body is shutting down, it is likely to cause at least a minor concern, and many times a full blown fear that one’s life is threatened with intense feelings of horror or helplessness.

And this all happens with good reason!  Medical research with CAT scans shows that after a severe trauma, the volume of the hippocampus can actually shrink up to 14%.  This is the part of the brain that releases the “brake pedal” chemicals, is involved in memory and is connected to the Broca’s area of the brain which is involved in speech.  Yes, the brain actually shrinks!  Then there is a lot of chemical and neurotransmitters released in the brain, gas pedal chemicals, making it very frenetic and nothing is there to shut it down.  So the primal anxiety, the loss of memory and the loss of speech control is highly understandable as this part of the brain is greatly compromised and unable to control itself.  When someone after a trauma says they’ll never be the same, they are actually right.  They may have had a brain drain, up to 14%.  For some of us, that is a lot of brain.  For others, 14% is not a lot of brain, but it all is relative.

On the other side of the coin is the person that has an event happen, has a little anxiety for a few weeks, and then starts having these strange visual hallucinations – they start seeing dollar signs wherever they go.  They see them at the doctor’s office, see them in your office, they see them on the witness stand.  They see the boat they want to buy, the sports car and the new house, and think their case is like a winning lottery ticket.   Or they have had serious emotional problems all their life and the trauma gives them an excuse to be a ‘ditz-brain’ and never accomplish anything for the rest of their life.  Or they just want people to feel sorry for them, and having suffered a trauma is a good path to sympathy.  The trauma stays alive, so the dream can stay alive.  You spend countless hours working for your one third and then on the stand they get exposed in a major way.  Unfortunately, this is a major segment of the traumatized in the 21^st century.  In psychology, it is called “secondary gain.”  I like to call them “Trauma Queens.”

Want to find out if you have a real trauma, or a “Trauma Queen?”  You start with an interview where the criterion for trauma can be tested.  Find out if there was a shutdown?  Was there a threat to life?  Did the person feel helpless?  Did they stop functioning at work, as a husband or wife, or stopping enjoying fun things?  All these are very important points because the anxiety alone is not trauma.  You may refer the person for an initial evaluation with a psychologist.  There are actually a couple of good psychological tests for whether a person is falsifying trauma information or whether their claims are valid.  They look at learning curves for people suffering real trauma and people trying to fake it.  It never hurts to have hard data.  This gives you a chance to know whether what you are dealing with is real trauma or a “Trauma Queen.”

Dr. Aumiller is the executive director of the Society for Police and Criminal Psychology, an international network of police and forensic scientists, therapist and researchers.  He consults in the court systems of Long Island and lectures throughout America and Europe.