Humiliation has been described by researchers as ‘the nuclear bomb of the emotions’ and has been shown to cause major depressions, suicidal states, psychosis, extreme rage and severe anxiety, ‘including ones characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder’. Criminal violence expert Professor James Gilligan describes the experience of humiliation as an ‘annihilation of the self’. His decades of research in prisons and prison hospitals, seeking the causes of violence, led him to ‘a psychological truth exemplified by the fact that one after another of the most violent men I have worked with over
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