The Nov. 8, 2004 New Yorker (p. 75) has a great piece called “Getting Over It” by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s about the resiliency of us humans and how we generally are able to survive various traumas and continue on virtually undamaged.
The article points out that this view — although proven by research — is not widely held in the US. One example mentioned is an article on childhood sexual abuse, published in 1998, that found that the psychological health of college students abused as children was not, on average, worse than the health of students who had not been abused. The report upset a lot of people including the US Congress which voted to overwhelmingly condemn the analysis.
