Surely everyone knows that dangerous and extreme situations are a combination of circumstances that poses problems for a person, requiring extreme physical and / or emotional stress, often threatening life and health, in a word, going beyond ordinary human experience. How various disasters affect the psyche of people, we will discuss in today's article.
Extreme situations are also what we think of them.
The well-known wisdom that “life is 10% of what is happening to us and 90% of what we think about it” directly relates to the perception of an extreme situation. Indeed, not only a real threat to life for oneself or relatives is important at such a moment, but also how a person who has fallen into these conditions reacts to what is happening.
In this case, perhaps we can say that even the term “extreme situations” is a personal definition. Indeed, much of the characteristic of such a combination of circumstances can be attributed to the personal perception of the participant in the events:
- novelty, responsibility, difficulty of the situation;
- the presence or absence of information about what is happening;
- emotional stress at such a moment.
And only one section is:
external physical influences: hunger, thirst, pain, cold, heat, etc.
It is known, for example, that people experience natural disasters much easier than those associated with human activities. This refers to the conviction of victims (from, for example, an earthquake) in the participation of “God's will”, in the inability to somehow change the situation. But military conflicts, terrorist attacks, and man-made disasters simply “blow up” a person’s notion of the invariance of the world, the order of things and greatly disorient it.
Extreme situations are a shock not only for event participants
Often the consequences of the experience for a person become not only injuries, but also an oppressed state, exhaustion, sleep disturbance, irritability and unmotivated aggression.
It is proved that man-made disasters, natural disasters and other dangerous situations have a strong psychological effect (often expressed as a protracted or delayed reaction) not only on the participants in the events, but also on outside observers. Indeed, thanks to the media in the modern world, many people become “participants” in terrible events, involuntarily plunging into them and experiencing what is happening.
An example of such a situation is the death of Princess Diana, which, due to the enormous amount of information that poured on the inhabitants, turned into a tragedy not only for the princess's family and her friends, but also for an incredible number of completely strangers around the world. And these days even psychotic manifestations were observed in people deeply grieving about the death of Diana.
