Referendum PTSD

The mental health charity Mind describe PTSD in the following manner:

"If you are involved in or witness a traumatic event, it is common to experience upsetting, distressing or confusing feelings afterwards. The feelings of distress may not emerge straight away – you may just feel emotionally numb at first. After a while you may develop emotional and physical reactions, such as feeling easily upset or not being able to sleep.

This is understandable, and many people find that these symptoms disappear in a relatively short period of time. But if your problems last for longer than a month, or are very extreme, you may be given a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder."

I'm beginning to think that large sections of the British population are suffering from some of the early symptoms following the catastrophe of the EU referendum - and that whilst we are still well under a month on from the event itself many of us are going to succumb to a fuller version of what might be termed Referendum PTSD.

Emotional numbness was the first reaction. The sheer horror of what had happened was so intense that the mind did indeed focus on some quotidian tasks like the ironing or the washing up. That shifted gradually into a mood of really intense anger punctuated by moments of utter sadness in which people just wanted to cry. 

Anger was the dominant emotion though: for the first few days after the referendum I would have verbally assaulted anyone I met who was an Outer and traduced them for their stupidity, perfidy, arrogance; you name it. This was an absolutely overwhelming anger of the kind that reflects sheer disbelief that some of your fellow citizens can have been so wilful, so blind, so frankly crazy as to have ditched the future of country on the basis of prejudice. I ran conversations in my mind in which I sarcastically asked Outers whether they were an idiot or a bigot - although they did have the option to be both. I went round kicking street furniture and hitting street lamps with newspapers. We all posted furiously on social media as if to exorcise some of the pain by sharing it with others. I shouted in coffee shops to such an extent that I just had to leave.

Then there was the disbelief. Or rather a refusal to accept. I ran through increasingly bizarre and Byzantine schemes to overturn the result of the referendum - everything from a General Election to a refusal by Parliament to ratify the result even to the extent of wondering whether someone could be impeached - although quite who and about what was never clear.  

The desperation to deny, to find ways to overturn the result, to just shout abuse at the leadership of the Outs for their arrogance all start to fade. 

Underpinning all of this surface emotion had been a sense of dread that then took over and started to form a kind of occlusion; all is grey and misty, skies are leaden and there is no sign of light. There is a pain behind the eyes and headache that never fully dissipates

This sense of ongoing dread was founded on the growing realisation that there really was a new dispensation and one that was here to stay.

A dispensation in which all that is worst about the country was celebrated; the narrow minded, Little England, atavistic and indeed nativist sentiment that has been confined to the wilder extremes seemed to have moved towards the centre of the stage. That this country was never going to look and feel the same again and that the open, tolerant, sceptical and outward looking approach that seemed the obvious way to engage with a complex and inter-dependent world were not obvious to many and indeed was being directly assaulted. 

Many of our fellow citizens started to be victimised and abused as bigotry and hatred of difference emerged fully from the shadows. The sheer speed with which this has happened and the scale to which it has done so is extremely frightening. 

It feels as though the world outside the front door, even in 78% Remain Hackney, has changed greatly for worse and that we are peering into an abyss in which yet more horrors are the more likely to be unleashed.

That deep and pervasive sense that you no longer feel as at home in your own country as you did a matter of weeks ago is traumatic. There is a general sense of apprehension. It feels as though my view of the world has been taken out and stamped on by people who have no true sense of what they are doing and may have no awareness of the sheer damage that they have inflicted on society. Principles and bonds that we had taken as just part of being a modern European nation have been shaken such that we now don't recognise ourselves. Our European friends look on us with alarm and pity and incomprehension and they are right to do so. A circular firing squad is never a good place to be and we seem to have committed our future to just such as formation.

Anxiety, detachment, being easily upset or incandescently angry and moving between them at speed, being constantly irritable and just feeling intense distress at any reminders of what has happened are classic PTSD symptoms. Put on top of that a pervasive sadness and a deep seated loathing of those who have wilfully led us to this pass and you have the full sense of it.

So what would a CBT response to Referendum PTSD suggest? I think it would start from the well observed tendency of the depressed and traumatised to catastrophise and to over generalise; to magnify the negative and minimise the positive.

Is there any opportunity to re-conceptualise the referendum at the moment? Initially, maybe we can try to see the humour, however dark, in what has happened and the degree to which disaster has already been visited on some of the architects of Out. They will left to chew over the degree to which their little elite debating society game in which it matters not whether you are really right as long as you can muster the most plausible argument has backfired on them. So there is some satisfaction to be had in the hubris of some of the main players. Laughter is something demagogues hate. But there are only so many times that you can write pieces about turbots.

So most importantly, we can also realise that the most awful thing that we can do for ourselves and for our fellow citizens is to succumb to the trauma, to the feeling that it is all so awful that we are powerless. Those I dread most feed off that sense of desperation and hopelessness. They sound plausible if your narrative is that all is broken. A modern, outward looking country needs to be confident that it benefits from living in accordance with Enlightenment values: rationality, respect for the value of the individual, abiding by the rule of law and putting superstition of all kinds into a box marked for private consumption.

We can all live by these values a small amount each day. I think in CBT terms its the equivalent of learning to walk along the street able to look others in the eye with mutual respect, being kind when we can and thinking that, however tempting it is, the best thing is not to get mad - but to get even.