Stockholm Syndrome: Difference between revisions

** Another episode had a prison warden hiring a hitman to 'escape' with the warden's wife and kill her. The man decided not to go through with the killing and kept the wife around. After a few years, she barely even remembered her old life.

* ''[[CSI]]'' explored this trope with the character of Tammy Felton in the episodes "Face Lift" and "And Then There Were None".

** Arguably, Felix Gaeta and {{spoiler|Sweet Eight, who seemed to be a rare sympathetic presence - with a friend's face, no less - during the brutal Cylon occupation of New Caprica}}.

* ''[[Heroes (TV)|Heroes]]'' featured villainess Elle Bishop forcibly electrifying Peter, locked in a cell for four months, presumably every day. "You'll get used to it, and then you'll start to like it." It didn't work.

* So does Blink 182, on their album of the same name.

* Michael Jackson's short film ''Ghosts'' has his character Maestro confronted by an angry mob when it's revealed that he's been secretly entertaining kids in his creepy mansion. He turns out to have magical powers, and he proceeds to terrify the crowd with them; when they try to flee, he traps them and declares they're his guests. He summons a crowd of ghouls to assist them, and what follows alternates between entertaining the crowd and terrifying it, particularly when he magically possesses the mob leader, a mayor. When all is said and done, the mayor is the ''only'' person who still wants Maestro gone from the town.

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X28MZ5drPok Soldier] by Bitter Ruin seems to be about a very Stockholm-y relationship in which the narrators describe how they've given up on attempting to escape, and just want to be a good soldier for their captor.

 

== Real Life ==

* [[Sun Tze]] advises invoking this trope on POW ''as a matter of standard policy.'' Because it works often enough to be worth the effort. That's why, to this day, POW are still treated very nicely, at least in Geneva-compliant countries.

* A historical example: Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland, financed much of his campaign against England by taking English knights hostage and ransoming them back. He treated them so well that many would lose the will to fight against him when they were released.

* [[The American Revolution]]. [[George Washington]] ordered that all prisoners of war were to be treated humanely. As a result many Hessian prisoners taken by the American rebels were surprised at how well they were treated and did not try to escape. Some defected to the American cause, and after the war ended, and they were released, many chose to remain in America and become citizens.

* A less famous example where a man managed to convince several people that he was an MI6 agent on the run for his life, asking them to repeatedly give him money (culminating in about several million dollars) and asking a woman to run away with him under the premise that they were going to elope. That guy then threatened her when she was asked by real federal agents to bring him down. He got caught anyway.

* The sad case of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who ended up spending more of her life with her kidnapper than with her parents. In 2009 she had been rescued and is along with two teenage daughters she had by him. It has been speculated that the reason she didn't escape years later when she was allowed more freedom around the house was because of Stockholm Syndrome.

** Which is especially odd because unlike some other cases where this happens to this degree of severity, McElroy was only kidnapped for about a day, and during the trial had some difficult even recognizing who her kidnappers were. Her note also makes no sense, of her four kidnappers only 3 had been found and tried, and none of them were given the death penalty, and in fact one had been released by the time of her suicide.

* There are historical accounts of white females developing Stockholm's when captured by Native Americans. They were treated so well within their new society (some even made full wives of the warriors who took them) that when their husbands and menfolk came to rescue them, they would wake up the next morning to find the women had all escaped back to the Indians.

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[[Category:Stockholm Syndrome]]