Did childhood PTSD cause Hollywood star Will Smith to slap Chris Rock at the Oscars?

When he was nine years old, writes Will Smith in his memoir, ‘Will’, he saw his father brutally beat his mother. It was something that defines him – that fight to never feel so helpless again.

But was it this trauma that also caused him to lash out at Chris Rock at the Oscars when he made fun of Jada Pinkett Smith’s alopecia? Was her discomfort enough to rush him back to his childhood years?

Perhaps. On the site US-based MedPage Today, a medical news service provider, Psychiatrist Melissa Hankins, MD, writes on how childhood traumas can rear their heads in various circumstances. She adds: “Hopefully, rather than simply vilify Smith, and say he has ‘an anger problem’, people close to him can help him recognise that this is ‘a trauma problem’, and help him get the trauma-informed help in the form of therapy in combination with modalities such as emotional freedom techniques (EFT or ‘tapping’), eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR), or other somatic modalities that can effectively and efficiently release the traumatised aspects held in the memory and body.”

While the jury is out on what constitutes childhood trauma, Dr Waleed Ahmed, Consultant Psychiatrist at Priory Wellbeing Centre, Abu Dhabi, explains: “The newer American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) definition is more inclusive of the different types of traumatic events that include:

“This includes directly experienced, witnessed, knowledge of a close family member or friend experiencing trauma or repetitive and extreme exposure to distressing and aversive details of a traumatic event.”

The fallout of these events may be termed post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Dr. Ahmed says: “PTSD is essentially a psychological condition following a traumatic event, characterised by distress, re-experiencing of parts of the event, along with symptoms of hyper arousal, avoidance behaviours and some degree of emotional blunting.”

“Typically, symptoms arise within a few months of the traumatic event and earlier classifications would limit it to within the first six months, but also accommodate symptoms arising after that period within other diagnoses relating to personality changes. The DSM-5 includes people who may develop symptoms many months or even years after the event, recognising that PTSD symptoms may take time to express themselves. But even in people who have manifested symptoms later in life, there is almost always a history of less severe symptoms in the immediate aftermath of the traumatic event,” says Dr Ahmed.

Dr Arif Khan, Paediatric Neurologist and Founder of Neuropedia, adds: “Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has both silent and visible effects on the child's brain.”

He explains that in the case of a toddler suffering from PTSD, he or she will start crying hysterically when they see their parents fight or talk loudly.

Dr Khan lists the following symptoms:

Dr Khan explains: “When a child goes through a traumatic episode that does not necessarily cause PTSD like an adult fight or an accident, or being one of the receivers like being beaten up by their parents or even shouting, this also can cause detrimental effect on a child’s development. This increases the production of cortisol, a stress-related hormone, which affects the section of the brain known as the hippocampus causing it to reduce in size. This affects their memory and emotional processing functionality.”

Dr Ahmed says: “Researchers and clinicians also note different types of trauma in terms of how they present in a time line – one type of trauma is a discreet, sudden, dangerous and isolated event with limited duration (such as a disaster); the other type includes sustained and repeated stressors that are variable, multiple and chronic (ongoing abuse). Although not a diagnosis, ‘complex PTSD’ or ‘complex trauma’ is often described in survivors of various kinds of prolonged physical and sexual abuse. Symptoms include:

“This type of disturbance is often diagnosed under other categories than PTSD. Therefore, depending upon the kind of symptom cluster a survivor of a traumatic event/s experiences - particularly in childhood - it can have a bearing on how they relate to others in their significant and casual relationships.”

CDC says that childhood traumas can be addressed using psychotherapy, in which the child can speak, draw, play, or write about the stressful event. It adds that behaviour therapy, specifically cognitive-behavioural therapy, helps children learn to change thoughts and feelings by first changing behaviour in order to reduce the fear or worry. Medication may also be used to decrease symptoms.

Childhood traumas inform everyone’s adult behaviour, explains Luz Maria Villagras S., a UAE-based Conscious Parenting Coach, Hypnosis Therapist and Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner. She says: “Generational patterns are learnt from mum and dad; they can be nice, have good communication, so when the child grows up, that’s how they relate to people. In the case of a child with a dysfunctional childhood, the relationship concept will be negative and chaotic. And they will mirror and project what has been given to them. They will act out. They will project what was familiar to from their childhood.”

It's not so far-fetched then to argue that the Oscar fiasco was caused because of a flashback; when Smith saw his wife’s flinching face, he may have remembered his mum’s pain-streaked expression from that night when he was nine. It may have caused a knee-jerk reaction that he will definitely pay for – not just in terms of a 10-year Oscar ban or burnt bridges in the industry but also, unless he gets some help, it will exact a heavy toll on his sense of self.

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