In His Dark Cell, Anderson Gave Imagination Free Rein

During his nearly seven years of captivity, Terry A. Anderson built a dairy farm in his head--”I worked out the economics, the staffing, how much milk is selling for, what’s the support price, how many cows can you support with how many acres and all that kind of stuff”--and engaged in other thought games just to survive.

He fantasized at times about running a newspaper and recalled memories from his childhood over and over. “I thought about every moment I could remember in those seven years,” he said Friday at a press conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. “I’ve thought about everything I’ve ever done or said or thought about doing.”

The mental exercises that Anderson performed are instinctive techniques that have long enabled prisoners of war and other captives to endure long ordeals of isolation and emerge mentally healthy, experts in post-traumatic stress disorder said Friday.

“There is only one thing that is left free when they are captives, and that is their imagination,” said Dr. Terence M. Keane, director of the national center for post-traumatic stress disorder at Boston Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

“To the extent their imaginations can provide solace and distraction from their immediate environment is the extent to which they will be able to survive,” he said. “People who can call upon positive memories . . . and construct in their minds . . . goals for the future are those who will suffer the least emotionally.”

Keane and others predicted that Anderson and his fellow former hostages would be a rich resource for those seeking to know more about how individuals--particularly civilians with no survival training--learn to cope with such deprivation. The lessons could be valuable to the military, to diplomats and to others who might find themselves caught in similar perilous situations.

“We don’t know a great deal about people like that--civilians--who are put into conditions of isolation, deprivation, threat of execution and other forms of psychological torture,” said Dr. John P. Wilson, an international expert on post-traumatic stress disorder. “The ability to study them is important.”

Keane agreed. “I would absolutely love to sit and talk with these people,” he said. “It would be comparable to studying Holocaust survivors or ex-POWs. These are very different people--but they have all been held captive against their will.”

Prisoners seem to have the unique ability, when isolated from the stimuli of their usual environments, to recall events from when they were as young as 2 or 3, experts said.

“Some reported they were really surprised at the things they remembered--Bible verses they learned in Sunday school, entire scripts of movies they had seen as children,” said Dr. Edna J. Hunter, deputy chairwoman of the advisory committee on former prisoners of war for the Department of Veterans Affairs. “Sometimes when they get back, it often bothers them how quickly they lose this power of recall.”

Hunter said that many individuals have an innate ability to devise such mental exercises, “even people who have never gone through survival school. They seem to come up with these same basic things: structuring their time, taking one day at a time and fantasizing about the future and remembering the past,” she said.

The stimulation of mental games can relieve sensory deprivation and can help individuals maintain “some sense of control in an environment in which there is none,” Wilson said. “We know from various studies that the ability to have some personal sense of control in a chaotic, unpredictable and constrained environment is very important for the maintenance of mental health.”

Anderson said that another factor that greatly sustained him was the companionship of other hostages. “We explored each other’s minds, we talked, and it wasn’t always easy,” he said. Hunter and others said such company is critical to survival, noting, “It’s the ones left by themselves who have the worst time. When you’re alone, you do fantasize, but it’s very difficult to hold on to reality. You get into a fantasy world, and sometimes you become afraid you can’t go back to reality. . . . You don’t have anybody to bring you back to reality.”