The Trauma of Facing Deportation
(aka The Apathetic) published in The New Yorker
The apathetic children began showing up in Swedish emergency rooms in the early two-thousands. Their parents were convinced that they were dying. Of what, they didnt know; they worried about cholera or some unknown plague. Soon patients with the condition filled all the beds in Stockholms only psychiatric inpatient unit for children, at Karolinska University Hospital. Göran Bodegård, the director of the unit, told me that he felt claustrophobic when he entered the rooms. An atmosphere of Michelangelos Pietà lingered around the child, he said. The blinds were drawn, and the lights were off. The mothers whispered, rarely spoke to their sick children, and stared into the darkness.
By 2005, more than four hundred children, most between the ages of eight and fifteen, had fallen into the condition. In the medical journal Acta Pædiatrica, Bodegård described the typical patient as totally passive, immobile, lacks tonus, withdrawn, mute, unable to eat and drink, incontinent and not reacting to physical stimuli or pain. Nearly all the children had emigrated from former Soviet and Yugoslav states, and a disproportionate number were Roma or Uyghur. Sweden has been a haven for refugees since the seventies, accepting more asylum seekers per capita than any other European nation, but the countrys definition of political refugees had recently narrowed. Families fleeing countries that were not at war were often denied asylum.
I wonder if we'll start seeing this syndrome here?