The Pueblo incident. A comparison of factors related to coping with extreme stress.

Abstract

The 82 surviving crew members of the<i>USS Pueblo</i>were evaluated psychiatrically after their release from 11 months of imprisonment in North Korea. A group of men defined as coping with the stress well was compared to a group who tolerated it poorly. Men who did well had personality diagnoses often listed as "healthy" or schizoid. They tended to use a wide variety of ego-defense mechanisms, particularly faith, reality testing, denial, rationalization, and humor. Men in the group defined as handling the stress poorly were frequently diagnosed as being passive-dependent and were more limited in the number of ego-defense mechanisms utilized. Factors such as age, education, and length of military service were not significant in differentiating between the two groups.