Mental health experts warn Hasan broadcast could cause PTSD in viewers

Broadcast believed to mark first public U.S. execution in almost a century

The U.S. Department of Defense’s plan to livestream the December 3 firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan could expose viewers to post-traumatic stress disorder and other lasting trauma, three mental health experts told The Guardian in reporting published Thursday. The broadcast, if it proceeds, is believed to be the first publicly viewed execution carried out by the U.S. government in almost a century.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that Hasan, a former army psychiatrist convicted of fatally shooting 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, would be executed by firing squad on December 3. Hegseth characterized the 2009 attack as “a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks” and said the public would be allowed to watch. “It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.

Dr. Simon Duff, a forensic psychologist at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, said research into the impact of watching an execution remained thin, but pointed to studies of journalists exposed to violence as evidence of a documented trauma response. “Certainly if people are not resilient they probably shouldn’t [watch], but if they have some underlying psychological driver towards viewing an execution they will likely do so regardless of the potential for harm,” Duff said.

Duff also pointed to a recent failed lethal injection in the United States as evidence that the broadcast could unfold in ways that intensify the trauma for viewers. “Recent events suggest that executions do not always go to plan,” he said, in an apparent reference to the failed lethal injection of Christa Pike. “That possibility needs to be acknowledged, and the likelihood that this would increase the trauma for viewers.”

Neil Greenberg, a professor of defence mental health at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, said trigger warnings had not proven effective at redirecting viewers away from distressing material. “Instead they are likely to suffer anticipatory anxiety before the ‘trauma’ is shown and some people will then become distressed,” Greenberg said. “It is likely that people who have pre-existing mental health problems will be especially at risk of becoming distressed or experiencing a deterioration in their mental health.” Greenberg urged potential viewers to forgo the broadcast entirely: “My advice would be not to watch the event at all and I would hope that mainstream media would not transmit highly traumatic images [or] sounds.”

Prof. Rosalind Crone, a historian at the Open University in the United Kingdom, offered a longer perspective on the practice. “Public execution in England and Wales was abolished in 1868 because of persistent and increasing concern about the effects of watching hangings on the crowd,” Crone said. “It was clear that public execution did not have a deterrent effect, in fact, sometimes the opposite.” She added that, in the decades preceding the British abolition, crowds at public executions were “increasingly made up of people missing work to attend, and people who were drunk, rowdy and celebratory.”

Crone quoted Charles Dickens’s 1846 letter to The Daily News to illustrate the era’s mounting objections to public execution in Britain. Dickens, she said, “sums up the increasing objections well” in the letter with the observation: “No sorrow, no salutatory terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness, nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flouting vice in fifty other shapes.”

Crone argued that public execution had not functioned as a deterrent in the British or broader historical record. “Public execution – and execution full stop – does not work as a deterrent,” she said, adding: “If anything, the use of a medium like video broadcast will likely generate new, potentially more dangerous problems in managing crowd responses and reactions.”

The Guardian’s reporting placed the U.S. government’s planned broadcast outside the prevailing international practice on executions. According to the publication, only two of the 17 countries that carried out executions last year did so publicly. The planned broadcast is believed to be the first publicly viewed U.S. execution in almost a century.