Malala: Living Like You Matter

By Dr Eve Hepburn 

Image credit, Barby Dalbasco via Unsplash 

Most people have probably heard of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a debilitating mental illness caused by traumatic events. PTSD was first recognised after World War 1, when soldiers were seen to suffer from psychological distress or ‘shell shock’ based on their experiences of war, though we know that PTSD can be caused by a variety of traumatic experiences, including being attacked, abused, bullied, injured, or indeed any event that causes you to fear for your life.

Not everyone who experiences a traumatic event develops PTSD – the symptoms of which include nightmares, reliving the event, emotional numbing and feeling on edge. But many do, with the Royal College of Psychiatrists estimating that a third of trauma-sufferers go on to develop PTSD.

You would therefore assume that if a person had experienced multiple life-threatening traumas – such as being verbally abused, sent multiple death threats, forced to leave their country, and shot in the head by a trained assassin – they would be at high risk of developing PTSD.

That’s where I want to talk about Malala Yousafzai, the schoolgirl who survived a Taliban assassination attempt and became a beacon of hope for millions of girls around the world.

And that’s where I want to talk about Post Traumatic Growth (PTG), the little-known sibling of PTSD that the scientific research community is only slowly beginning to understand.

Malala’s story is so well-known, it almost doesn’t bear repeating here. As an 11-year old girl from Pakistan, Malala – encouraged by her school-teacher father – began to speak out against the Taliban’s efforts to stop girls from attending school. Malala was invited by the BBC to write an anonymous blog narrating her experiences of being a girl growing up under the new Taliban regime, where she was suddenly forbidden to read books, listen to music or gain an education.

But as Malala began to shed her anonymity by speaking up publicly for girls’ rights to education on TV and radio, thus did the anger and retaliation from her Taliban enemies commence.

Along with award nominations for her activism, she began to receive death threats on Facebook, and slipped under her door. Then on 9 October 2012, when Malala was riding home from school on a bus with her friends, two masked gunmen got on and shouted ‘who is Malala?’ And when the 15-year-old peace activist identified herself, she was shot in the head.

Amazingly, Malala did not die. She woke up a week later in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the UK with a serious head trauma and subsequently went through months of surgeries and rehabilitation. In early 2013, she was released from hospital and settled into a new apartment in Birmingham with her family. In her beautiful autobiography I am Malala, she first describes feeling disoriented and anxious, struck by loneliness, worried about her family’s financial future [Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb (2013) I am Malala: The Girl who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pp140-150]. Like other displaced or migrant people, Malala realised that her life, her friends, her community, were all thousands of miles away and that her life would never be the same again.

For Malala, ‘It was then I knew I had a choice: I could live a quiet life or I could make the most of this new life I had been given. I determined to continue my fight until every girl could go to school.’

Malala was quite possibly exhibiting Post-Traumatic Growth, which is what happens when someone ‘experiences a traumatic event that challenges his or her core beliefs, endures psychological struggle (even a mental illness such as post-traumatic stress disorder), and then ultimately finds a sense of personal growth’ according to Oakland University Associate Professor of Psychology Kanako Taku.

“Although Malala had suffered considerably – and her experience of vivid flashbacks of the shooting after she moved to the UK are possibly indicative of PTSD – this stress and pain did not prevent her from experiencing positive growth.”

Although Malala had suffered considerably – and her experience of vivid flashbacks of the shooting after she moved to the UK are possibly indicative of PTSD – this stress and pain did not prevent her from experiencing positive growth.

Indeed, Malala went on to scale-up her activism and commitment to women’s rights and education. Within months of leaving the hospital, in 2013, she gave a speech to the UN in New York calling on world leaders to provide free education for every child in the world, and she established a charity, the Malala Fund, which dedicated to ensuring that every girl has access to free education and can attend school without fear of violence. In 2014, at the age of 17, she became the youngest ever person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

And ever since then, Malala has been travelling the world to meet girls fighting poverty, war and discrimination to help them with their struggle – visiting refugee camps in Iraq and Kenya and opening a school for Syrian refugee girls in Lebanon.

How did she manage to be so strong?

According to the group of scientists at the University of North Carolina who coined the phrase PTG, ‘the idea that human beings can be changed by their encounters with life challenges, sometimes in radically positive ways, is not new. The theme is present in ancient spiritual and religious traditions, literature, and philosophy. What is reasonably new is the systematic study of this phenomenon…’

“Certainly, not everyone who experiences trauma and PTSD will develop Post-Traumatic Growth. Scientists have been analysing traits that make post-traumatic growth more likely”

Certainly, not everyone who experiences trauma and PTSD will develop Post-Traumatic Growth. Scientists have been analysing traits that make post-traumatic growth more likely, which include openness to experience, extraversion and age – for instance, ‘those in late adolescence and early adulthood—who may already be trying to determine their world view—are more open to the type of change that such growth reflects,’ according to PTG psychologist Dr Richard Tedeschi.

Malala’s open world view may have therefore helped her navigate and make sense of her trauma. We know from her autobiography that two other factors helped her experience positive growth in the months and years that followed her trauma. The first was the love and support she received from her family (for instance, she said her father had ‘always been my ally and inspiration’ and he helped her establish the Malala Fund), and from strangers around the world.

When she was in hospital, she discovered that ‘thousands and millions of people and children around the world had supported me and prayed for me. Then I realised that people had saved my life. I had been spared for a reason.’ Linked to this, Malala had a deep sense of meaning in life – her fight for the empowerment of girls – and her sense of purpose simply grew after being attacked. ‘I realised what the Taliban had done was make my campaign global,’ she says constructively.

Malala is now studying for a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford University, while simultaneously finding the time to drive forward her global mission of girls’ empowerment at the Malala Fund. Her story teaches us that trauma survivors are not condemned to stress and negative health implications. While pain is inevitable, growth is also possible.

After being attacked, Malala was able to make her next step in the direction she wanted – as a survivor with a sense of purpose, rather than a victim cowed by fear, as the Taliban wished. And while the world has been rightly awed by her near-superhuman feats of bravery and courage, her decision – to keep going, to help others, to live – is surely one that is in reach for all of us.