General Adaptation Syndrome

Source: Movie: Into the Wild
Summary: After a childhood of witnessing his parents arguing, his father physically abusing his mother and verbally abusing his sister and himself, Christopher graduates from college, donates $24,000 to an organization that feeds the world’s hungry, and disappears from his family. Christopher is a very intelligent, sensitive person who became so cynical about the world because of his parents, that he tried to make sense of it all by making his way to Alaska to experience “The Wild”.

Application: His encounters with many people along the way make for a very interesting story with a lot of applications of psychology, but I want to focus on Christopher’s childhood. Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) can be applied here. The abuse that Christopher witnessed and experienced as a child was alarming when he first realized what was happening to his mother. This led to the resistance stage, since the abuse continued totally out of Christopher’s control throughout his childhood. A few coping strategies developed as Christopher got older, such as social support when he protected his sister and comforted her, and eventually escape, when he left everything and went “into the wild”. The exhaustion stage manifested itself in Christopher’s unrealistic assessment of the dangers of living completely off the land in a harsh environment like Alaska. Although he had read many books about survival, he was not prepared.