Survivor guilt

Similar signs and symptoms have been recognized in survivors of traumatic situations including combat, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, air-crashes and wide-ranging job layoffs.

Stephen Joseph, a psychologist at the University of Warwick, has studied the survivors of the capsizing of the MS Herald of Free Enterprise which killed 193 of the 459 passengers.

The subsequently well-documented syndrome among Holocaust survivors includes anxiety and depression, intellectual impairment, social withdrawal, sleep disturbance and nightmares, physical complaints and mood swings with loss of drive.

[11] While AIDS survivor syndrome has not been recognized as a pathologizable illness by the NIH (as of December 2017[update]), scientific research and publications are available that address this issue.

[12] American musician Waylon Jennings was a guitarist for Buddy Holly's band and initially had a seat on the ill-fated aircraft on February 3, 1959, which would later come to be known as "the day the music died".

[13][14] On February 14, 2018, Nikolas Cruz went into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and shot randomly at students and staff, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others.

[15] Less than a week later, on March 23, Coral Springs police announced that Calvin Desir, a juvenile male student from Stoneman Douglas, had been found dead as a result of an apparent suicide.

One strong theme running through his work is his own sense of survivor guilt -- a feeling in part triggered by the death of a friend who left Launceston for the war on the same train in 1940, but was later lost in action in the North Sea.

For instance, Causley tells of how, when walking through the town centre years later, he would cross the road in order to avoid coming face-to-face with that friend's mother.