Famed author Walter Isaacson claims in his new biography of the Tesla CEO that Elon Musk suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder due to a turbulent childhood that included Time spent in apartheid South Africa and an abusive father.
But are the co-founders of six companies really suffering from mental illness? Thought to affect approximately 5% of the world’s population? Did Isaacson misuse the word, as mental health experts say? Or maybe Elon’s mental state is more nuanced than Isaacson alludes to?
“As a child growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk understood pain and learned how to survive,” Isaacson writes In his new book, “Elon Musk,” Published Tuesday by publisher Simon & Schuster.
Isaacson, who has written other best-selling biographies such as those of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Leonardo da Vinci, describes young Elon’s time in South Africa’s “wilderness called veldskool Survival Camp” time. This business expert calls it a ‘paramilitary organization’ Lord of the Flies. “
There, “bullying was considered a virtue,” Isaacson writes. “Each child was given a small amount of food and water, and they were allowed – actually encouraged – to fight over food and water.” Elon, who was small and clumsy at the time, first worked there. He was “beaten twice” and lost 10 pounds.
At one point, Isaac wrote, attendees were “divided into two groups and told to attack each other.” “‘It was crazy and exciting,’ Musk recalled. Every few years, a kid would die. Counselors would tell these stories as a warning. They would say, ‘Don’t be like that idiot who died last year. That’s silly.'”
Traumatic injuries are common.Post-traumatic stress disorder is not
Dr. Craig Chepke, medical director of Excel Psychiatry Associates in Huntersville, N.C., and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York, who spoke on the subject, said such experiences can Leading to a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)..
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, criteria for diagnosing the disorder include “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence.” Because of this, when people think about PTSD, their thoughts often turn to veterans or survivors of violent crimes, such as assaults.
“But it’s really more complicated than that,” Chepke said of the disorder, which can be caused by intimate partner abuse or even a “major car accident” — any significant trauma that threatens life or limb. , or there are huge fears facing them. “
Everyone gets scared from time to time.But for the fear experienced by those who go on to develop PTSD, “it’s really a dramatic increase,” he told us wealth. While fear is appropriate, given the extreme nature of the situation, “the brain learns to hold on to fear, so the fight-or-flight response persists long after the threat is removed.”
But not everyone who experiences trauma develops the disorder, Chepke said. In fact, the vast majority of people don’t. Why some and not others? Genetics may play a role, among other factors.
But it doesn’t stop there. “Our destiny is not just written in the stars” or in our genes, said Czepke. adverse childhood experiences— Negative, often traumatic events such as abuse, neglect, domestic violence, divorce, parental mental illness, substance abuse, and/or incarceration — may make a person more susceptible to PTSD. They may even lead to different forms of illness.
More detailed diagnosis
According to the new biography, in addition to traumatic experiences at veldskool and elsewhere, Elon also had a troubled childhood, thanks to his often abusive father Errol.
Isaacson quoted Elon and his brother Kimbal as saying that the elder Musk “had an incarnate personality.” “One minute he’s friendly, and the next he can launch into an hour or more of relentless abuse. Each of his tirade would be telling Elon how pathetic he is.”
The world’s richest man recalled his father’s tirades as “mental torture,” Isaacson wrote, getting choked up as he said his father “really knew how to make anything scary.”
The abuse did not meet the formal diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. But Chepke said it could meet criteria for CPTSD, or complex PTSD. He calls it “another form of post-traumatic stress disorder” – a mental health condition that develops in people who have experienced chronic or long-term trauma, or “microtrauma.”
People with complex PTSD “don’t have a specific, defining event, like they were in Fallujah and their buddy stepped on an IED or something like that,” the psychiatrist said. Instead, CPTSD involves a series of “less carefully defined traumas that build up like sediment, leading to PTSD—and it’s very real.”
People with the disorder often have low self-esteem and difficulty with relationships, he said. “They are very distrustful of others. They become hypervigilant. They assume that anyone they interact with has malicious intent because they don’t know how to truly trust someone.”
Not everyone with CPTSD realizes they have the disorder or even recognizes that they have experienced abuse or trauma, Chepke said.
“I can’t tell you how many patients over the years I would ask them, ‘Were you abused, neglected, bullied, anything like that?’ And they would say, ‘Oh, no. I had a normal childhood,'” He said.
“And then it’s like, ‘Well, you know, my dad beat the shit out of me every night from the time I was 5 to 13. But, that’s normal, right?’ “
“They really mean it,” he added. “They usually have no frame of reference. To them, it’s normal.”
One, two, neither, or something else entirely
As with PTSD, it is possible to experience the traumatic events necessary for a diagnosis of CPTSD without developing the disorder. So it’s possible that Elon has one or both, neither, or something else entirely.
Isaacson wrote that Elon’s “childhood post-traumatic stress disorder… left him with an aversion to contentment.” But according to Czepke, “almost every psychiatric diagnosis circulates in popular culture.”
“Someone gets good news and has a good day, and then gets bad news and has a bad day — someone might say, ‘Oh, they’re so polarizing,'” he said. “Anyone who’s neat and organized would say, ‘They’re so OCD.'”
The same misuse of terminology occurs with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Chepke said. “If someone’s favorite football team lost, they might say, ‘Oh my gosh, I got PTSD from that game when the quarterback had five turnovers’ or whatever. Obviously, it’s not post-traumatic stress disorder. Stress disorder.”
“You can’t assume that’s a verifiable medical diagnosis just because you say that.”
One potential example: In November, Musk mentioned that he allegedly suffered from “recession post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),” which kept X and PayPal alive in the 2000 recession and left them alone in the 2009 recession. Tesla survives”. wealth reported before.
Here’s another: Grimes is the mother of Elon’s three children, one of whom she mentioned is named X, “Three-day PTSD meltdownOn April 20, SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded.
Chepke said it’s possible for a person to experience a traumatic event and not develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) but still exhibit behaviors associated with those conditions, such as Hypervigilance or anxiety.
“They may have major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, personality disorder,” he said. “If they’ve never experienced this kind of trauma, they could have a host of other completely unrelated mental illnesses. There’s overlap.”
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