Psychic Trauma on the Opera Stage

• mass homicide
• school shooting
• PTSD
• posttraumatic growth

Consider the following: a wedding celebration for Tuomas and Stela in Helsinki, Finland. The Romanian Stela admires Finland’s reputation for safety. A convalescent facility with young men and women suffering emotionally and behaviorally. An international high school. Nine languages. The last-minute substitution of a server at the wedding banquet, the mother (Tereza) of a teenage female (Markéta) who died in a school shooting ten years earlier and whose ghost haunts the party. Tuomas’s parents, Henrik and Patricia, at odds about disclosing something to Stela, “the tragedy.” Tereza identifies Tuomas’s family, aghast at their celebratory mood. A revelation that the school shooter was the older son of Tuomas’s parents and that Stela had not been informed. The shooter has been released from custody under a new name. Surviving students graphically displaying posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, verbalizing distress in their native tongues.

Innocence, the final work of celebrated Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, premiered in 2021 and opened in New York in 2026. It is performed in under two hours without intermission. Breaking the tension would be unthinkable. The stage is set with a two-story structure, almost continuously rotating to show the school, the banquet, and various locations in the present and during the shooting.¹ Bloody scenes, grief, outrage, helplessness, guilt, and shame are portrayed within. The dizzying effect recalls the swirl of perception, feeling, and memory that often defies clinical description. The libretto, cleverly multilingual, permits latitude of expression universalizing trauma. Parts of the opera are sung traditionally whereas others are spoken or even half-sung (Sprechstimme) or eerily wailed as Finnish herding calls by the teenage ghost. Details of the production can be found through the Metropolitan Opera online.¹

Research literature has enriched our understanding of school shootings while emphasizing the limitations of profiling.² The complex dynamics involved render full reconstruction difficult, especially when the shooter dies without leaving a manifesto or video evidence signaling intent. Murder and all manner of dark emotions and unforgivable behavior are no strangers to the opera stage. In Innocence, however, the viewer is not distracted by period settings and costumes, historical events, or suspension of disbelief. We believe it, assaulted by drums representing gunshots, anguished cries, and pained faces. There is a cinematic counterpart, We Need to Talk About Kevin.³ The 2011 film, directed from the point of view of a school shooter’s mother (Tilda Swinton), also tracks the mysterious wild card of child development (the apple falling far from the tree⁴) and how quickly and deeply parents become pariahs. For viewers, it is painful and terrifying.

I will leave it to music critics to explain the interplay among the orchestra, vocalists, and storyline in Innocence. Suffice it to say that it is a brilliant tapestry. Nevertheless, why would a forensic psychiatrist take a busman’s holiday to endure this spectacle? The short answer is that it provides more information than a psychiatric interview and could modify one’s forensic assessments and reports in practice. The importance of Innocence for forensic professionals is in the multiple dimensions of trauma portrayed. When assessing survivors, it is insufficient to say that they meet criteria (or not) for PTSD. Labels are not people, and diagnostic criteria are only proxies for suffering. Secondary victims and communities tend to be forgotten after the flowers and stuffed animals are removed and the reporters and politicians who condemned the act have moved on.

Psychic trauma does not live in linear space-time. In the opera, we see it also in culture, social interactions, and circumstance (the collision of loss and celebration). The immense loss of life, ten students and one teacher, is a point of departure. That the survivors of the school shooting might experience intrusive memories, avoidant behaviors, depressed mood, and sleep disturbance is apparent. But more, the story tracks individual narratives of the unnamed shooter and his family. Tuomas’s father raises him to have manly traits, like shooting, which he now regrets. The shooter, as a student, is teased and taunted as an oddball. His chief tormentor, Markéta, publicly recites cruel poems about him. He becomes radicalized and develops a vendetta, recruiting a student, Iris, to block the exit during the attack. We learn later that the shooter’s brother Tuomas agreed to help. Both coconspirators back out at the last moment. A priest attempts healing, for example, Patricia’s failure as a mother and Tereza’s inability to move past Markéta’s death. The cleric must also accept that he knew the shooter had tortured animals but failed to intervene. For all the characters, forgetting is not an option, their dynamics individualized.

With some exceptions, innocence (in the sense of culpability) is absent and innocence (in the sense of unspoiled) is shattered. Amid the characters’ shame, guilt, and grief, and lacking resolution, hope lives in some of the survivors’ plans (implying posttraumatic growth).⁵ Although the subject matter of Innocence may be off-putting, it is a fitting topic for operagoers. For forensic professionals, who are at risk of vicarious trauma, the lessons of Innocence are manifold. Chief among them: it’s the narrative, not the symptoms or nosology.⁶ Thus, when evaluating a person after a potentially traumatizing event, a strict disease model and formulation may fail to capture context and historical, interpersonal, and personal dynamics. Innocence may be a roadmap for guiding evaluators through the web of trauma created by a violent event.

• © American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law