Catherine Nibbs is a clinical and academic researcher, consultant in the fields of cyber trauma

and online harms and adult trauma psychotherapist.

As a therapist and a researcher, she often meets people who fell victim to cyber crimes, but cannot let go of the mental pain.

I worked with a lady in the beginning of lockdown actually and what was in fact there's

been a lot of people that I worked with during lockdown because that seems to have increased

this issue one particular lady became so worried and moved into her

imagination of people being in her house, in her devices that what she would actually do is unplug things and for example

she would take the router to bed on a night time. So she would actually try and prevent

any kind of electrical activity by removing the connection

from the outside of her home to the inside of her home.

And this is very, very similar to people who have been violated in sexual violence and rape,

that what they then try to do is carry out activities that help protect them and they may not look

logical to the next person who's who's listening or watching or or working with them.

And of course this for me is one of the biggest areas that's

misunderstood in terms of cyber-related traumas. Hi and welcome to Sabirism's malicious life, I'm Ren Levy. For much of human history, PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder wasn't an

officially recognized mental illness. The ancient Greeks wrote about soldiers who

returned from battles suffering from nightmares and flashback like dreams

and similar accounts can be found in manuscripts from the Middle Ages and even in Shakespeare's

plains. But even as recently as World War I, shell-shocked soldiers were mocked or even beaten up by their commanders.

Awareness of the devastating effects of PTSD rose in the second half of the 20th century when psychologists began to study

Holocaust survivors and later veterans of the Vietnam War. Even then when in 1980 PTSD was officially included in the third edition of the American

psychiatric association diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, better known as the DSM,

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