"So, in 1973 there was this bank robbery In Stockholm. Two gunmen took
four bank clerks hostage. This doesn't happen much in Sweden, and the
police response can most charitably be described as inept. They
surrounded the bank and kept it under siege for six days.

The public was rapt. The police probably felt they couldn't back down.
They got off to a bang up start when they sent their psychiatrist Nils
Bejerot and a teenaged kid THOUGHT was the gunman's younger brother into
the bank to negotiate. The kid was not in fact the younger brother and
he got shot. Nils got out, though. Put a pin in that.

One of the hostages was a woman named Kristin Enmark. She strategically
got close to the gunman who seemed more sane and more stable, because
she thought that getting his protection was the best bet for getting out
of there.

Definitely she didn't want to leave their lives in the hands of the
police. She tried to talk to our friend Nils on the phone -- he refused
to talk to her.

From inside the bank she gave a radio interview: "[The police] are
playing with our lives. And they don't even want to talk to me, who is
the one who will die if anything happens."

She was terrified the police would storm the bank and she and the other hostages would be killed in the cross fire. She even called the Swedish
Prime Minister, proposing a plan where she and another hostage would
leave the besieged bank with the two robbers.

The prime minister refused to agree, saying they couldn't give in to the demands of criminals. He told her: "Well, Kristin, you can't get out of
the bank. You will have to content yourself that you will have died at
your post."

When the police finally did teargas the place, they captured the gunmen
and paraded them up and down the street. Enmark had had quite enough of
theatre that would have cast her as "dead hero" and now wanted her to be
"dazed victim."

She refused to get into a stretcher, walking out of the bank instead.
She was not visibly traumatized in what the public considered the
appropriate way. And she was critical of the police, especially their psychiatrist, our boy Nils.

It was at that point that he made up a syndrome -- Norrmalmstorg
Syndrome, for the part of the city, later Stockholm Syndrome -- on the
spot, and diagnosed her with it without ever talking to her personally.
Jess Hill writes: Stockholm Syndrome is a myth invented to discredit
women victims of violence, created by a psychiatrist with an obvious
conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman
questioning his authority."

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1611171203783294977.html'm

TB

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