Can the Chilean Miners Let Go of a Primal Trauma?
The recent disaster that trapped 33 Chilean miners for the past 2 months piqued my curiosity as a psychiatric researcher: how will these hearty survivors cope with the aftermath of being buried alive?
One of the most terrifying (and depressing) movies I’ve ever seen was the 1988 film, TheVanishing, directed by George Sluizer-a film that hinges on its protagonist’s being buried alive. This is far from an original motif, as Susan King observed1 in a recent Los Angeles Times piece: Hollywood has used it many times, and Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Premature Burial,” explored this same horrific theme in 1844.
The recent disaster that trapped 33 Chilean miners for the past 2 months-as I write this, the last of the miners was just rescued-brought back these literary associations, and also piqued my curiosity as a psychiatric researcher: how will these hearty survivors cope with the aftermath of being buried alive? Is this particular trauma, by its very nature, more primal and terrifying than other traumatic events-such as experiencing a tsunami, an explosion, or a mugging? Does being buried alive tap into evolutionarily determined “fear pathways” in a manner not characteristic of other traumas? So far as I can determine from the published literature, there has been little systematic research on this question, which probably reflects the relative rarity of being buried alive and the paucity of psychiatric investigations in such instances.
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