Medical Explanations of Bewitchment - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

It's possible that King Phillip's War, concurrent with the Salem witch trials, induced PTSD in some of the "afflicted" accusers. Wakanabi allies of the French attacked British colonists in Maine, New Hampshire, and northern Massachusetts in a series of guerrilla skirmishes. Survivors blamed colonial leaders for the attacks' successes, accusing them of incompetence, cowardice, and corruption. A climate of fear and panic pervaded the northern coastline, causing a mass exodus to southern Massachusetts and beyond. Fleeing survivors from these attacks included some of the maidservant accusers in their childhood. Witnessing a violent attack is a trigger for hysteria and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Not only might the violence of the border skirmishes to the north explain symptoms of PTSD in accusers who formerly lived among the slaughtered, but the widespread blame of elite incompetence for those attacks offers a compelling explanation for the unusual demographic among the accused. Within the historical phenomenon, witch trial 'defendants' were overwhelmingly female, and members of the lower classes. The Salem witch trial breaks from this pattern. In the Salem witch trials, elite men were accused of witchcraft, some of them the same leaders who failed to successfully protect besieged settlements to the north. This anomaly in the pattern of typical witch trials, combined with widespread blame for the northern attacks on colonial leadership, suggests the relevance of the northern guerrilla attacks to the accusers. Thus, Mary Beth Norton, whose work draws the parallel between the Salem witch trials and King Phillip's War, argues implicitly that a combination of PTSD and a popular societal narrative of betrayal-from-within caused the unusual characteristics of this particular witch trial.