Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

"Traumatized society." It's a glib phrase, one that sounds like a plausible and appropriate way to characterize a country that has undergone the military, political, economic and social disasters Georgia has been through in the last 15 years. I thought of Georgia that way when I set out to report the material that appears in these pages; the resulting sketches, I thought, would be a portrait of a nation in trauma, or recovering from trauma. As often happens, though, once I had to begin connecting those abstract words to the real-life words I was listening to and scribbling in my notebooks, I found I also had to reconsider the premise. What did it really mean to say that a society was traumatized? What are the symptoms? (Ji Weihong, my biologist friend from China and one of the wisest, most clear-minded thinkers I know, asked me that question when I told her about this project. Her question startled me, but it shouldn't have. If I'd been thinking more clearly, I'd have asked it myself much earlier.) Can "traumatized society" have a literal meaning, or is it a metaphor?

Gradually, as I listened to people and when I thought afterward about what they'd told me and how to write what I'd learned, I realized that I was not forming a clearer or more solid idea of what a traumatized society was, or what the symptoms might be. I hunted down various definitions of trauma: “an emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis"; "an emotional shock that causes serious psychological damage"; "the experience of stress and distress that are too much to handle emotionally and psychologically"; "extreme stress that overwhelms a person's ability to cope"; "the individual feels emotionally, cognitively, and physically overwhelmed."

I thought about Giorgi Chubinishvili, about Guram Shushania with his sad smile at his stand next to the Polytechnic Metro station, about Vladimir the ex-hippie and Irina the unreformed Soviet citizen and their endless arguments, about my friend Shota the "unemployed philosopher," about Giorgi's neighbor Imeda and the grapevines growing behind his house that represent his hopes for the future. They and many other Georgians I know are, in various combinations, depressed, disappointed, frustrated, pessimistic, and angry about their country's situation and their own. But given Georgia's conditions and recent history, this hardly suggests "serious psychological damage" or being too overwhelmed to cope. On the contrary, those feelings seem sane, rational, and entirely normal.

There are Georgians who are too demoralized to cope, obviously, but most do, in very difficult circumstances. And Georgian society has strengths, as well as hardships. Almost all Georgians have "close relations with each other. Many friends, many relatives. We think about each other," I was told by a young woman named Leila Rekhvliashvili. A lecturer once told her, she went on, that "in Europe and the USA, almost everyone has a psychologist," because people have no time to be concerned with each other's problems, but people in Georgia rarely need a psychologist because they almost always have someone to talk to.

This can be too much of a good thing, to be sure. Georgians often feel there is much too much meddling in their lives by friends, families and neighbors, and that their individual identities and needs are suffocated in unwanted attention and advice. (I know one psychologist who says that Georgian mental health would improve 100 percent if mothers were banned.) But companionship and support must help many people get through hard times. Many years ago, in the course of a reporting assignment, I spent some time learning about treatment of post-traumatic stress patients in a special inpatient unit in a Michigan hospital. The traumas those patients had suffered were varied, and so were their symptoms, but a common thread was that nearly all of them lived relatively isolated lives, without strong family relationships or close friendships. Possibly solitary people are more vulnerable to some kinds of traumatic events, and I suppose in some cases emotional isolation was a consequence of post-traumatic stress, not a cause. But another possible explanation was that close ties to others might help someone recover more easily from a traumatic experience, and that loneliness might have been one of the reasons those patients in Michigan continued to be troubled enough to need hospital treatment. It is pretty easy to be lonely in America. It's far harder in Georgian culture, and it seems a reasonable guess that for that reason the country's recent past has caused less emotional damage than it might have otherwise.

"If you speak about some groups, yes, there are some traumatized groups" in the Georgian population, said Rusudan Mshvidabadze, another psychologist. But she also feels that "people are more adapted than 5-6 years ago," and concludes that in general, "to speak about a traumatized society in Georgia, I don't think is right if you speak about the whole society." The more I reflected on my own glimpses into Georgian lives, the more I came to agree. As a metaphor, it's not completely inaccurate — certainly, 15 years of crisis have left unhealed emotional wounds. But, as I finally realized, it doesn't describe Georgia as a whole. I had started out thinking I would learn something about human damage. What I learned taught me more about human strength and resilience instead. Post-Soviet Georgia was not the first place to teach me about those things, but as I've also come to understand, it's a lesson that is always worth learning again.