Memories

    Memories provide the mind with a response. When you first feel the taste of sweet sugar on your tongue, the next time you have the chance to have it you will be eager to eat the tasty ingredient. But when you feel a sharp needle pierce your thumb, your avoidance of needles will increase throughout your life. This is what I learned in "Bent, Shattered, and Mended".
    The body and brain are inter-connected and a memory and trigger a strange or particuliar response. In the hunger games, with dangers and threats lurking at every corner, bad memories are a common part of everyones lives. The tributes especially suffer from PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This makes people have nightmares of these memories, lashing out, trying to escape them. It also makes people try to escape from the outside world and that is why narcotics and alcohol (Haymitch) are common for people who have this. In this world the Capitol makes you remember every last bit of horror that you've ever seen. It makes people go insane, sometimes even killing themselves over a 5 second horror. The Capitol turns the hunger games into a reminder. It is turned into a gruesome, evil, un-forgettable movie, that you are forced to watch every year, watching friends and family die and be mutilated. The capitol changes people, once you go in you never make it out the same.