The wounds borne by Egypt’s former detainees

For a political detainee in Egypt, release doesn’t mean the end of imprisonment. It is rather the beginning of another form of it. This is what thousands of former detainees released in recent years know all too well, as they continue to live under the threat of re-arrest at any moment — a threat turned reality for many, over and over again. In a recent statement, Al-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence condemned the arrest of three founders of the Committee to Defend Prisoners of Conscience: lawyer Mohamed Aboul Diyar, lawyer Wafaa al-Masry and pharmacist Hanan Tantawy. Their detention is yet another episode in a long-running pattern targeting both human rights defenders and former detainees. While human rights and political discourse has focused on the legal aspects, there is a deeper psychological dimension that deserves attention: what happens to a person who lives under the constant threat of losing their freedom once again? To grasp the scale of this pattern, it is important to consider the broader context. Since the January 2011 revolution, Egypt has undergone successive political transformations, intensifying after mid-2013 in a systematic campaign of repression targeting political opponents and human rights advocates. Al-Nadeem center’s 2025 annual archive alone documented 309 cases of forced disappearance, 78 deaths in custody, 71 documented cases of individual torture and 1,439 cases in which disappeared persons later reappeared. It also recorded 253 detainees suffering from deliberate neglect. These figures cover just a single year, coming atop nearly 12 years of the same policies. This means that hundreds of thousands of Egyptians live with the direct psychological consequences of having a relative detained. Alongside them are thousands of former detainees released in recent years who continue to live under the constant threat of re-arrest, including through what human rights and political reports have come to describe as the policy of recycling — detaining the same person again in new cases after they have completed a previous sentence. Al-Nadeem center’s 2025 archive includes firsthand testimonies of people subjected to this practice. One former detainee describes his experience at Dar al-Salam Police Station: “If you go in, you’re lost; if you go out, you’re reborn. At Dar al-Salam, there were 46 of us in a single cell. Two-thirds had already been released and were waiting for a signal from the National Security Agency. Half of them were literally recycled into new cases, as if in an endless loop. Before they were brought before prosecutors, they were given new clothes and haircuts so they would appear to have been arrested the day before rather than held for months.” Conventional diagnostic frameworks, particularly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), assume that the traumatic event has ended and that treatment is centered on processing and integrating the traumatic memory. But the former political detainee in the current Egyptian context does not inhabit an “after.” Instead, they live within a temporally open-ended vacuum. Understanding this condition requires two complementary theoretical frameworks: Ambiguous Loss Theory and the concept of Continuous Traumatic Stress. Ambiguous loss and frozen grief The theory of ambiguous loss was developed by American psychologist Pauline Boss in the 1970s through her work with families of American soldiers missing in Vietnam. She distinguished between two forms of loss: the first occurs when a person is physically absent but psychologically present, as in cases of forced disappearance or detention; the second when a person is physically present but psychologically absent, as in cases of dementia or severe addiction. But former political detainees and their families occupy a more complex position that doesn’t fit into either category. The person returns physically, yet often without fully regaining their psychological and social presence. Meanwhile, the family loses its ability to recover a sense of security. What is lost here is presumed safety and a plannable future as they were known before the first arrest. This is known as frozen grief: a mourning process that cannot reach completion because the loss itself remains unresolved. The person can neither grieve the old life as something that has ended, nor begin a new life that is safe and available. In the 1980s, South African psychologists working under apartheid, most notably Gill Straker, developed a complementary concept they termed Continuous Traumatic Stress. It holds that when a threat remains present and credible in both the immediate and foreseeable future, conditions such as hypervigilance, anxiety and the anticipation of harm are not pathological symptoms to be extinguished, but adaptive responses to a genuinely dangerous environment. This distinction is clinically crucial. To interpret a former detainee’s fragmented sleep, waking at every knock on the door before dawn, sometimes sleeping fully dressed, keeping a packed bag by the door, avoiding saying certain names in phone calls or withdrawing from public participation as signs of an anxiety disorder or social isolation is a diagnostic error. These behaviors don’t reflect a distorted perception of reality, but an accurate reading of it. A testimony recorded in Al-Nadeem center’s 2025 archive captures this impact: “The body doesn’t forget. I tried to leave everything behind. It wasn’t possible. Because memory is not just images and events; it is emotion etched into the body, into the details of everyday life, into those moments that resurface without warning.” This complex condition manifests itself through a number of intertwined patterns. Former detainees find themselves living in a state of suspension, unable to make long-term decisions, from marriage and having children to purchasing a home or committing to stable employment, because any life project may be interrupted by another arrest. In Al-Nadeem’s archive, a former detainee aptly describes this suspended life: “The suitcase has stood by the door for years, and the photos are tucked away in the folds of papers; they don’t hang on walls that are not mine. All that I’ve lived through since has been nothing but waiting, nothing but a deferred life.” As for sleep disturbances, nightmares and periods of insomnia frequently cluster in the hours before dawn, when most arrest raids take place, until the body itself becomes a biological clock for danger. Alongside this emerges what is known as survivor’s guilt: a sense of guilt toward peers who remain detained, a feeling that intensifies with each new arrest, reopening wounds. A released detainee describes this state: “I’m out of prison now, but I think about the 60,000 detainees in Egypt’s prisons whose lives have been stolen. And I let helplessness and anguish fill me, because if they didn’t, then something would be wrong.” Added to this is what is known as re-traumatization. Each new wave of arrests reproduces the original trauma, forcing the person not merely to deal with a single traumatic event but to relive it repeatedly. This can give rise to the characteristics that American psychiatrist Judith Herman identifies as Complex PTSD: disturbances in emotional regulation, sense of self, relationships and systems of meaning. These are hallmarks not of just one traumatic event, but of repeated exposure to trauma. Perhaps the testimony of journalist and former detainee Abdelrahman ElGendy, posted on his Facebook page, sums up what theoretical frameworks struggle to: “This year is my sixth outside prison, the same amount of time I spent inside. I thought that once I’d been outside for as long as I’d been imprisoned, my body would move on. But no, nothing. Sometimes I go through several days in a row inundated by nightmares — nightmares of being arrested again in all sorts of scenarios; nightmares of beatings during the tashrifa intake ritual, and worst of all, nightmares of the helplessness of sitting in a prison cell while receiving terrible news about the people you love.” Most tellingly, the comments beneath his post were filled with other survivors describing the same experience. Here, the collective nature of the phenomenon reveals itself. These are not scattered individual symptoms but a common imprint left by prolonged detention policies on the bodies and minds of those who have lived through it, persisting years after their release. Gendy himself had assumed the classical PTSD theory would apply: that time heals, that the body moves on. Instead, he found out, from within, that this assumption does not hold for those who continue to live under an ongoing threat, even when they have physically left Egypt. Nor does this psychological burden fall only on the former detainee. It extends to their entire family. Spouses, parents and children who grow up in an environment where they learn not to ask questions, not to trust strangers, not to plan for tomorrow — they all experience their own version of frozen grief, often entering this system of suffering without considering themselves sufficiently affected to seek support. One of the painful accounts of this burden comes in what a former detainee wrote to his daughter, from AL-Nadeem’s archive: “When my daughter Farida visited me in prison, half the visit would be spent in tears and hugs, hugs filled with so much to say: I’m sorry, my love, for putting you in this position. I miss you all. Don’t worry, your father is a [strong] man. Don’t you be ashamed. Hold your head high.” This psychological burden is compounded by others, no less severe: economic instability, social isolation brought about by others’ avoidance of the detainees’ families and the stigma that weakens the natural structures of social support. As a result, families are deprived of the very resources they need in order to heal. The social dimension: A collective loss Boss later expanded her theory to encompass what she termed collective ambiguous loss, a framework that applies with particular precision to societies living under prolonged political repression. In such contexts, social trust erodes, spaces for public engagement contract and solidarity itself becomes a risky act. This is precisely what Al-Nadeem’s statement points to when it speaks of a “climate of fear and continuous intimidation” in Egypt today. Repression directed at those who defend prisoners of conscience is, at its core, an effort to dismantle the very networks of psychological and social support which those recovering need, ensuring that there is no one left to organize, no one left to support and no one left to bear witness.  From this emerges a conceptual imperative: recovery from political trauma cannot be understood through a purely individual lens. The classical Western model of psychotherapy assumes that, with professional support, an individual can rebuild their inner world independently of external circumstances. That assumption collapses when the wound itself is produced by those circumstances and renewed by them on a daily basis. Therapeutic work with former detainees therefore requires several important shifts in thinking. First, persistent anxiety and hypervigilance are not always symptoms of illness. When danger is real and ongoing, such responses function as forms of self-protection rather than disorders to be extinguished. Second, it becomes necessary to distinguish between anxiety that responds to an actual threat and anxiety that spreads into domains where no threat is present. Third, the person must be helped to inhabit two contradictory states at once: to carry hope and grief simultaneously, to continue building a life even while the threat remains and to pursue recovery without waiting for danger to disappear as a precondition for healing. This is what Boss calls “both/and thinking”: the capacity to hold opposing states together without one cancelling out the other. More importantly, the very concept of healing must be redefined. Recovery cannot be reduced to an individual’s restoration of internal balance. In the work of Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad al-Sarraj, who founded the first psychiatric community centre in Gaza, and Salvadoran social psychologist Ignacio Martin-Baró, the founder of Liberation Psychology, healing is understood as a collective rather than individual survival. It is achieved through rebuilding networks of support, reclaiming the political meaning of resilience and practicing solidarity itself. In this sense, collective organizing and the pursuit of rights are therapeutic interventions in the true sense of the term, not ideological luxuries to be postponed until after recovery.  Although healing begins the moment a person regains their voice, rejoins others and reclaims the political meaning of their resilience, its completion ultimately requires that loss cease to be ambiguous. For former political detainees, this ultimately means an end to persecution and pursuit: the dismantling of structures of repression and the reconstruction of governance on democratic and rights-based foundations that restore people’s right to a plannable life. Perhaps the testimony of a former detainee who spent six years in prison, as recorded in Al-Nadeem’s archive, sums it best: “I came out into a world where people communicate in ways I couldn’t comprehend. I was simply afraid. The world was frightening.” Thinking about his comrades who have remained in prison since 2013, he adds: “What the regime has done to tens of thousands of people is not just an injustice. It’s a crime against humanity, so heinous that most of us can’t comprehend it.”The post The wounds borne by Egypt’s former detainees first appeared on Mada Masr.