So intense pain and injury would cause immediate memory loss?

 

But the Cruciatus Curse causes pain. So how does that effect the mind other than pain? I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this.

 

It causes unbearable pain. So when the pain is not relieved, the mind of a witch or wizard does the only thing it can to stop it: it turns itself off.

 

"Imperio. (Music) Don't worry be happy now... (end music)"

 

Well, "it's magic" argument would definitely be because Rowling didn't think about it so the argument stops there I suppose. But it's worth examining at least.

 

As a moderate expert, I don't feel like the Longbottoms as described really fits for PTSD, turning over many years, into true and persistent catatonia. Unusual for PTSD, and Neville never seems to have really lived with them since that event. Quite an acute, sudden thing. (and besides I agree with what the others have said, where there's a magical cause then whatever makes causal sense doesn't matter [as Fudge says to the PM magic can't just undo magic]).

I'll clarify my other post now, and clean it up, but I was thinking, who do we feel fits in this book as presentations of mental trauma?

There's the Longbottoms, and Lockhart - both discombobulated by magical means, so can't read too much into how that process went or how that would be treated.

I feel like Tonks was suffering from depression when Lupin was rejecting her, but it might just be appropriate grief from rejection/heartsickness. Her patronus changed but, again, this may better fit as an expression of her true and abiding love for Lupin rather than grief or trauma (I don't have the books here to check the passage).

Voldemort is the most textbook - raised muggle and a psychopath, almost as if she went through the psychopath checklist as she wrote his orphanage scene, long before he ever split his soul with magic. Still, muddying the waters, is the fact that Voldemort was conceived under a love potioned union - although I've always felt that was more likely symbolic, I think JK once said if he'd been raised in a loving household it could have gone very differently.

 

Yes it does. Sorry if I made my statement seem like fact.

 

You're all thinking WAY to hard on this as there really is a very basic and common (Muggle) explanation. The curse causes pain. Intense pain. Intense pain unrelieved sends a person into Neutrogenic shock. The heart slows down and blood pressure drops (shock), driving the cells into anaerobic respiration. When shock hits the progressive stage, capillaries fail and fluid and protean leak into tissues and organs, which slows down or stops circulation even more in different areas. Finally, in the Refactory stage, brain damage and cell death occurs, and it is unrecoverable. All of that has been proven over and over. It's why WWII soldiers started carrying morphine in the battlefield. When the pain is stopped, the soldier has a much better chance of not dying due to shock.

Now, go back to what Harry experienced under the curse to see how it lines up:

So, it seems to me it's a very simple answer. The Cruciatus Curse drove both Longbottoms into shock, and they stayed in it so long (12 hours of pain or so) that they ended up with brain damage from it. Not sure why we have to read more into it than that.

 

The canon is that the Longbottoms were tortured 'into insanity' (if you believe Dumbledore), not that they were tortured into brain damage or death. Perhaps he's mistaken, but perhaps the effects aren't quite so mundane.

 

The cruciatus curse is also Dark magic-- some of the worst Dark magic, even. And we know Dark magic has lasting incurable effects beyond normal magic (it's why Moody's leg won't heal). For my interpretation, at least, that means whatever the Longbottoms are suffering from is innately a kind of magical trauma.

 

Or we don't need to take his words so literally.

 

If the brain damage is hypoxic and muggle, why wouldn't episkey or some equivalent fix it?

I prefer to think there's a magical component perpetuating the symptoms and preventing recovery in cases like Lockhart and the Longbottoms.

EDIT: I'd want to reread the passage, but at least with Neville's mum, she's walking around, talking to Neville in a 'mad' way. I'd expect more motor symptoms in hypoxic infarcts, to the point where it's led to loss of speech. I'll have to reread the passage, but I don't think it's what Jk was thinking or describing when she wrote that scene.

 

Especially when insanity is a pretty broad term that can cover a huge variety of conditions, and substantial brain damage can cause a wide spectrum of mental disorders.

 

Exactly. Moreover, I just read back through the scene in OotP where they see Neville in the Hospital. It reads very much like his mother had massive head trauma rather than literal insanity. And as for fixing it, you can't. What's dead is dead, even in the HP world. In this case, lack of oxygen from that type of shock for that long of period simple caused parts of the brain to die. That could very easily replicate a brain being wired wrong...insanity.

 

Bollocks. Capital D Death, certainly. But it's magic, and it's not a graded spectrum.

The fact that Moody has to specify that it's a dark magic induced injury implies they can fix dead cells. Every episkey that repairs a nose bleed or hippogriff laceration is fixing/working around dead cells.

These are wizards who can transfigure a man, for example, into a ferret (without human understanding or memory) and then back into a human with all the memories complete.

Magic is the key factor here, not muggle pathology.

Edit: and having just reread the scene, it's interesting that you have a different impression of it compared to what I remember, I only have up to the prisoner of azkaban with me, what supported it/or is there anywhere I could read an extract of it?