Insight: June 24

This week on Insight, Jenny Brockie begins a two-part discussion on Survival and what it takes to overcome adversity.

Part Two will air next week.

Rob survived three nights adrift at sea after becoming separated from his dive boat. Fiona was travelling down the Amazon River in Ecuador when she was kidnapped. James was on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower on September 11.

Over the next two weeks, Insight asks, what does it take to survive?

Survivors tell host Jenny Brockie what goes through their minds in those critical, life-changing moments. She asks what drives people to fight for life – and whether the battle to survive is worth it.

This special two-part program over two weeks explores the stark and unpredictable human responses to immediate danger, and the ways in which we keep ourselves going in the face of extreme adversity.

Part 1 guests include:

Rob Hewitt
Rob was separated from his boat on a recreational dive off the coast of New Zealand in 2006. It wasn’t until the sun started to set he realised he was in serious trouble. He tried to think of someone who had survived something like this, ‘I’d come to the conclusion that no one had done it’. Rob would in fact spend four days and three nights adrift at sea, suffering severe hallucinations and exposure.

Fiona Wilde
When Fiona’s tour boat was stopped in the middle of the Amazon River in 2012 she thought it was a robbery, but “once they got us off that boat and got us to run at gun point, that was when I figured this might be real.” Fiona was held hostage for 30 hours, and throughout her ordeal, she knew she had to stay valuable to the bandits because the “only way out is relying on these three people that have just kidnapped me and are threatening my life.”

David Jacobs
In 2008, the world watched as Mumbai was hit by eight terror attacks around the city. David took refuge in a cupboard in his room in the Oberoi Hotel. While terrorists took over the hotel for three days, David’s lifeline was his mobile phone, which he used to stay in touch with friends, family and security analysts who talked him through the siege.

James Dorney
James sat down at his desk on the 92nd floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, when he saw a massive explosion in the building opposite. Ignoring announcements his Tower was secure, he started to evacuate; ‘It’s impossible to describe a Boeing 767 slamming into the side of the building you’re standing in’. Hundreds of people flooded the stairwells which James says was, ‘extremely challenging, the feeling of helplessness… Not being able to move’.

Prof Richard Bryant
Prof Bryant is a world expert in the psychological response to trauma. In times of extreme stress, when our lives are threatened, we experience a number of reactions, from tunnel vision, to time distortion and freezing. ‘As a species, we’ve worked out ways to survive… Adrenaline is released, and it creates all the body reactions that we need to deal with the threat’.

Tuesday at 8.30pm on SBS ONE.