Ruminating on the commonly asked question, “Why didn’t Jupe ever go to therapy?” I believe that the question has a variety of possibilities.

A singular event, even one lasting six minutes, can have severely mind-altering effects that may take a long time in therapy to unravel. However, there are many misconceptions about healing from trauma, especially childhood trauma. We don’t know enough about what happened after the Gordy’s Home event or Jupe’s parents, but perhaps he did go to therapy, and it didn’t go on for long enough for it to have a lasting impact. Perhaps therapy sessions were voluntarily cut short by Jupe, who is shown to consistently downplay his trauma. There is a pressure to speed run recovery and get back to “normal” again, perpetuated by even the most well-meaning uninformed person and internalized by the survivor. If one were to reach a more simple conclusion, there also exists the possibility that Jupe simply never went to therapy. We should consider the context of the Gordy’s Home incident happening at the end of the 1990s. The societal attitude surrounding mental health has shifted radically since then, so the stigma surrounding therapy could have been a real issue. Not to mention that his trauma also could’ve been downplayed by other people, potentially overshadowed by the cast members who left with permanent damage, including and especially Mary Jo. For those who are unaware, there is an incredibly informative Fangoria article about Gordy’s Home as a collaboration with Jordan Peele that gives more insight into the chimpanzee attack.

“But wait,” you may ask, “there’s so much work against the stigmatization of therapy in the current day. You’re implying that he went this long without seeking help despite that?” Yes, this is an unfortunately common reality for adult survivors of traumatic childhood events. As you get older, recovery sources for childhood trauma shrink to nothing. I personally have experienced this problem as a person in the recovery process from childhood trauma. Despite the overwhelming concern for children who go through trauma, it goes radio silent when they grow up despite them needing support. There’s this overwhelming feeling of people wanting you to “just get over it” because you’re so much older now, and certainly, you’ve healed mentally after all these years. While seeking to exploit his pain to regain attention from the public and dealing with the mockery of his trauma from the media are contributing factors to Jupe’s dismissal of his trauma, I strongly feel another is that he is now a married adult with three children and the incident happened as a young child. I feel emboldened to write so extensively on Jupe Park because he captures a reality for survivors of childhood trauma that I rarely see. Recovery is a long, complex road, and the processing of trauma, and lack thereof, can oftentimes look unpleasant. It’s why I consider Jupe being more sympathetic in the story as more than other people would. The things he did were wrong, but trauma can make you do really weird and awful shit.