The commentaries I write have always stood alone … until today’s.

This week on Tech Nation, I speak with Nic Dunlop, a photojournalist who was moved by the photos of over 20,000 Khmer Rouge, who were secretly tortured and executed during the Khmer Rouge reign in Cambodia in the late 1970’s. That’s right – in addition to the estimated 2 million ordinary Cambodians, who were killed during those four short years, the Khmer Rouge also tortured their own.

As Dunlop’s story develops in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, he ultimately comes to face-to-face with the one-time commandant of this secret internal prison, where these 20,000 people were brought, along with some 2,000 of their children. It was a place that one could only enter, and except for perhaps a dozen, there was no exit.

Still, it was the depiction of Cambodia post-Khmer Rouge, that kept bothering me – and here’s why …

To create a peace, the Khmer Rouge were incorporated back into society, and the official national policy became literally to forget the past. The tortured were not only intertwined with the torturers, sometimes they were one and the same. It takes someone who was there to comprehend that anyone could have done anything in those horrendous times. And even if you survived, you did not escape the effects of near-starvation and slave labor, the murders of family and friends, and more. So much more.

Cambodia was a deeply-traumatized country, and here’s my concern: Trauma is a tricky thing.

One reason is that our brains attempt to protect us from trauma. In layman’s terms, some times an event is so traumatic, our brains will not record it in our memory. If anything, we might only recall a phrase that someone said, a stop-action visual, a smell. Or we might remember nothing. Sometimes the brain records the memory, but buries it deep. Only later, when the brain feels that it is safe, will the memory will come rushing back, overwhelming the victim with its stark reality.

Chronic trauma may have a different profile again. Our brains may reset to live in a constant state of panicked readiness. And the combination of repeated and multiple traumas have a way of adding up and internally paralyzing even the most robust.

Last August, Rand Corporation published a health study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They found that two-thirds of the Cambodian refugees who now live in the United States still suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, even today– some quarter century later. In the past year, half of that population also suffered from a major depression. This is many times its presence in the general population.

And Cambodia itself? It has increased its population to 12 million today, which was easily determined, but I had a hard time getting a handle on the situation as a whole. Then one number stopped me cold: In a nation of 12 million people, there are only 12 psychiatrists. That’s right – one psychiatrist for every onw million people. Whether or not you believe in modern neuroscience or today’s medications and therapies, this number is way too low.

With trauma, even if you wanted to forget, you cannot – and there’s something else: The children of traumatized parents inherit the trauma, as well. Ask the American-born children of Holocaust survivors, if the Holocaust was ever far away. Or didn’t define their lives.

It is time now to bring the human experience of trauma out of the silence and into the light. Whether inflicted by a political regime or a family member or friend, it’s time for science and technology to make visible these injuries and make strides towards healing.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.