09/29/2026
Remember there is no such thing as “Stockholm Syndrome”
Kristin Enmark was 23 and working at Kreditbanken in Stockholm when a bank robbery in 1973 trapped her and three colleagues for six days. Jan-Erik Olsson entered the bank armed and took them hostage. Clark Olofsson was brought from prison after Olsson demanded that his former cellmate join him.
Enmark’s trust was specific to Olofsson, who calmed Olsson and said he would keep her from being hurt. Police had already fired inside the bank, officers had been wounded, everyone had been locked in the vault, and an assault was being prepared. Enmark called Prime Minister Olof Palme because she wanted everyone to leave alive, even asking to go with the captors in the getaway car because she feared a police raid would kill them.
The psychiatrist who advised police during the siege, Nils Bejerot, watched that reaction and named a condition after it. He was advising the same police operation Enmark criticized on live radio, refused to speak with her when she asked, then labeled her brainwashed from outside the vault and implied a romantic bond. He never spoke to Enmark directly.
Bejerot first called it “Norrmalmstorg syndrome,” after the square where the bank stood, before it became known worldwide as Stockholm syndrome. The term spread internationally after the 1974 Patty Hearst case and became an explanation people reach for when someone stays with a cruel partner.
Enmark went on to become a psychotherapist, and she spent decades pushing back on the label pinned to her. In 2016, she framed her choices plainly: “All the things I did was instinct of survival. I wanted to survive. I don’t think it’s so odd. What would you do?” On the BBC’s Sideways podcast in 2021, she called Stockholm syndrome “bullsh*t” and “a way of blaming the victim.”
Stockholm syndrome has no diagnostic criteria and appears in neither the DSM nor the ICD. The DSM steering chair has said nobody ever submitted it for inclusion, and a 2008 review found that media accounts supplied most supposed diagnoses, with clinicians rarely making them.
A trauma bond can be a more useful everyday description for an emotional attachment that develops between a person and someone who abuses, manipulates or harms them. Trauma bonding isn’t a DSM diagnosis either, and it isn’t an official replacement for Stockholm syndrome.
