What we can learn from the Thai cave rescue

Read Time:4 Minute, 44 Second

By Kate Carre

Like the rest of the world, I have been glued to the news this week. I have been watching with bated breath and hoping against hope as this triumph against the odds unfolded.

I love stories of human resilience. It gives me enormous strength to realise that people are capable of surviving unspeakable trauma, and going on to rebuild a life that is not the same as before but equally valuable. Whilst it’s never helpful to remind someone struggling with mental health issues that many people have it worse, it is sometimes helpful for me to put my own worries in perspective. If it won’t matter next week, it doesn’t matter at all. And whilst this week I have worried about my child’s school trip arrangements, over analysed life and feared judgement… I haven’t been stuck in a cave four kilometres inside a Thai mountain, cold and without food, watching the water level rise and knowing rescue was treacherous. If human beings can survive that, I can survive a bit of social anxiety.

A more morally advanced society

Now that they are out, and the world breathes a sigh of relief, hopefully not forgetting the bravery and selflessness of Major Sanam Kunan, who lost his life delivering oxygen into the caves to enable this rescue… time will tell how the Thai boys and their rescuers assimilate their experience, make sense of it, and adjust psychologically. We perhaps won’t hear anything about it, given that the Western norm of media surveillance seems counter-cultural there.

We Westerners are guilty of viewing Asian countries as ‘behind’, less developed, in need of our expertise. The way the Thai authorities have handled the media intrusion, issuing very clear statements that it is unacceptable to violate the privacy of those directly affected and taking action against those who attempt to do so, always placing the welfare of the boys and their families above the wider world’s thirst for information, makes me realise… that as a society, the Thais are far more morally advanced than we are.

So, of course, I am speculating. Just like the rest. I don’t purport to know what went on in those cave. Or how human beings come to acceptance and peace following that experience. But I am confident that lessons can be learned that will help the rest of us develop our psychological resilience. And help us understand what other people need in order to optimise psychological health.

Vitriol versus empathy

The first thing that strikes me is the belonging, the community and the interdependence of the football team within that cave. For the two weeks before they were found, they sat in darkness with no one but each other. We can read endless literature about trauma bonds and the psychology thereof, but it doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to understand that those boys will have been completely psychologically dependent on each other. The cohesion in that group must be incredible.

We have heard that the coach chose to forgo his share of the meagre food ration so as to save as much as possible for the boys. We have heard that he drew on his Buddhist practice, teaching the boys meditation. I was interested to learn, from a friend who has lived in Thailand, that it is the norm for most young men to enter a monastery for a period of time, in fact, it would be unusual not to. I wonder whether this accounts in part for the coach’s extraordinary psychological strength.

The vitriol directed at the coach on British social media was apparent. He had possibly made a grave mistake, an error of judgement. Some reports suggest that the boys went into the cave alone rather than being led by their coach, and that he followed them to bring them home safely. Either way, we saw the contrast between the understated reassurance from the Thai parents as they stated that they did not blame him and thanked him for looking after the boys, and the litigious anger and scorn from the UK, was stark. Talk about kicking someone when they’re down. The Thai community showed understanding, forgiveness, respect, support and empathy. Again, we can learn.

We must learn from this

The other factor that strikes me is trust. In order to allow themselves to be rescued successfully, the boys and their coach had to place total trust in the expertise of the rescue team. They had to surrender control and accept that they couldn’t escape on their own. That is something we all struggle with, vulnerability and reliance on others. And culturally, it is not something that is encouraged in the UK.

Yet once the survivors had escaped, they were immediately protected by the community. Whilst the West tried to impose norms of commercial, public gestures such as tickets to the World Cup final, the need for privacy and a time of readjustment was essential. The boys were sheltered. I suspect that had this happened in the UK, they and their families would already be hounded for exclusive interviews and offered increasingly ridiculous sums of money in exchange for their story. For a country that places so much emphasis on analysing their trauma, we totally fail to put the actual needs of the real people involved first. We are, it seems, all talk.

All of this leads me to suspect that the mental health crisis in our society is largely cultural. We can learn from all of this… and it is essential that we do so, in order to avert disaster.

Reproduced with permission, originally posted on onmymindblogging