Fascinations with people facing difficult ordeals

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Do you have them too? I recently am very into the story of the cannibalistic rugby team stuck in the Andes in 1972, rewatching the movies on this case many times. I read also the story by Nando Parrado who was one of the survivors (his dad had a cool name: Seler, which in my native tongue means a celery ) - luckily, it was translated into my language. I read about this case for the first time as a child; in a teen novel "The Cauliflower Blossom" by a famous writer of teen girls novel series from my country, in which two teenage boys remark on this. It's my newest obsessive interest. Do you have any interests like that too? As a child and teen I liked the story of Robinson Crusoe as well - he didn't face any specially difficult ordeal (not in comparison with the one mentioned by me previously, at least) but he did live alone, on an island far from civilisation.

Yes, I do. Actually I liked that story a lot. I watched the movie, "Alive", and Googled the story after that. I also like to read stories about serial killers, trying to understand how they got there. I also enjoyed reading the Readers Digest because they used to publish "real live stories" about people going through very difficult situations. I do like to read that kind of stuff. My husband says I enjoy suffering, but I think you can learn a lot through other peoples experiences.

I saw a doctor some time ago; in the waiting room there were maybe three copies of Reader's Digest, in one of them there was published a story of a girl who lost her hands and had a baby from rape as a preteen - I forgot in what country it was.

It's a fascination for me, too. One of my recent interests pertaining to the subject at hand was with the Columbine High School massacre. I particularly liked reading about all the students being trapped in the library with the gunmen.

I think a lot of people have some sort of fascination with reading about dangerous situations. It might have something to do with the fact that, although most people would dread to have to face a difficult or dangerous situation, they feel slightly at ease with reading about it happening to other people because they know that they're not in any immediate peril. Or something like that.

Ok. That's ugly. I have a collection of old Reader's Digest magazines. The histories I like the most: about a young girl who died from cystic fibrosis, about a dying woman who overcome her illness due to a pregnancy (the doctors did not perform an abortion because they thought if they did it the woman would die), a flight attendant who saved about 10 people from a crashed plane before dying inside the plane, a man who had an accident in the field and took him two days to return to his home and the doctors were able to save him. There are a lot of those stories. All are fascinating to me.

I also have a great facination with those people. I'm facinated with couples who give birth to multiple children. I admire people who have lung and heart conditions that they were born with. I'm facinated with people who have Down Syndrome because not only do they have limitations to a certain extent, they have to deal with the hate that ignorant people direct towards their parents, mothers in particular and themselves. Mick Avory is my favourite original Kink becuase the Davies brothers directed the worst kinds of jokes and insults that anybody could come up with until he left the band in the early summer of 1984. There were videos of a man who had no legs or arms who's tag line was something along the lines of, "I am happy....I enjoy life!" I also admire war veterans, many who have lost their limbs and their friends. I also admire the millions of incontinent adults around the world, because they didn't choose that for themselves and they have to deal with a lot of nasty attitudes from ignorant people who discriminate against incontinent people. I admire the single mothers and fathers who live all over the world. I admire Chinese and East Indian women and girls as well.

Hmmm, I do remember that I might have been fascinated with that at one point in my life.

Very loosely related, I was once OBSESSED with deadly animals in the world and spent near a week googling and reading stories of deadly animals. I learnt that I am scared of blue-ringed octopi, mooses, and tigers.

Yeah.

It's a bit different, but I've always had a fascination with people who have really bad drug addictions. I can read threads on a forum called bluelight for hours. I like to read about heroin addicts saying they've run out of injectable veins and shoot up in their neck, or they shot black tar heroin in their muscle and got an abscess, or they injected their penis and had a really...okay, I'll stop now.

I think it's more that I'm fascinated by addiction itself and what it drives people to do. I'd call that a very difficult ordeal.

I'm also fascinated by schizophrenia.

I think when I heard about k-2, I went to the website and read for a few hours about bad stories from that.

I think I am interested in what exactly causes the pain, and what type of pain it is and how to avoid it.

For a while I was fascinated with eating disorders. I would spend hours reading posts in forums and watching movies about bulimia and anorexia.

I'm fascinated by attacks and disasters.

I pretty much think about the 9/11 terrorist attacks every day. I watch videos about it all the time, and I would absolutely love to go to the site where it happened. Every time I hear a police car I think of those police cars in the background on videos on the news on that day.

I'm not trying to be disrespectful or saying it was a good thing by any means, it was absolutely horrific, just so fascinating.

Also, the 7/7 bus bombings in London. Now that site I have gone to, years afterwards.

I think everyone is fascinated by other people's suffering. The Germans even have a word for it: schadenfreude. Why else would TV stations broadcast shows like CSI, or real-life documentaries/TV specials about kidnappings (like the Jaycee Dugard story) or school shootings (like Columbine)?

As horrible as it sounds, I like reading stories and watching shows about kidnappings and domestic abuse such as the books A Child Called It and Flowers in the Attic, or the aforementioned Jaycee Dugard story. It fills me with suspense waiting to see how they're going to make it out of the ordeal and how they cope mentally with it, and what I would do if I were in the same situation.

Also, during Halloween each year, I start developing a mild interest in the Salem Witch Trials, which was hysteria that occurred in Salem, Oregon during pilgrim times when political unrest in the town spurred on a witch hunt, where women were blindly accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death because of it.

Salem, Massachusetts, actually.

Oh, I hate those shows. I am only intrigued by things that the people could have avoided. So technically, my fascination is an evolutionary survival mechanism because I am learning how to avoid pain and dying.

Well, geography never was my strong suit... Up until a few years ago, I thought that Chicago was a state and not a city...

It's understandable, since Salem is also the name of Oregon's capital city. I was even confused by that at first.