Chowchilla revisited: the effects of psychic trauma four years after a school-bus kidnapping.

Terr LC.

A 4-year follow-up study of 25 school-bus kidnapping victims and one child who narrowly missed the experience revealed that every child exhibited posttraumatic effects. Symptom severity was related to the child's prior vulnerabilities, family pathology, and community bonding. Important new findings included pessimism about the future, belief in omens and prediction, memories of incorrect perceptions, thought suppression, shame, fear of reexperiencing traumatic anxiety, trauma-specific and mundane fears, posttraumatic play, behavioral reenactment, repetitions of psychophysiological disturbances that began with the kidnapping, repeated nightmares, and dreams of personal death. Brief treatment 5-13 months after the kidnapping did not prevent symptoms and signs 4 years later.

In 1976, 23 children were kidnapped in a school bus in Chowchilla, Calif., crammed into two vans for 11 hours, and, when night had fallen, removed one by one and forced into a hiding place - a moving van that had been buried in a nearby quarry. When they dug themselves out, they were greeted by a crowd of reporters, briefly examined by a pediatrician, and sent home. No one thought to contact a mental health professional.

A psychiatrist named Lenore Terr met the children five months later, when many were suffering from terrible nightmares. The studies that she wrote - first in 1979, then in 1981 - described children stuck in grim, repetitive rituals: one girl played bus driver, calling out the names of every child who had been kidnapped. Another girl ate compulsively and threatened to starve her kidnappers.

Over the next 20 years, the children of Chowchilla reported long-lasting, debilitating fears. Terr documented a litany of disappointment - one was incarcerated at 15, three girls dropped out of high school to get married, and the "hero" of the group had "drifted into a marginal existence on the run." Terr wrote that she could ";follow the Chowchilla kidnapping like a fine metallic thread through the fabric of many of these developing, young lives."