Uppgivenhetssyndrom: Refugee Children Facing Deportation Fall into Comas

Refugee children in Sweden are falling into a state that looks like a coma, when their family's applications for asylum are denied. The so-called "resignation syndrome", or uppgivenhetssyndrom, has so far been diagnosed in over 400 children. It seems unique to Sweden, and is found mainly in children from former Soviet states, many of whom are Roma.

A New Yorker article on the phenomenon has a detailed account of the syndrome and its manifestations.

The children, who have stayed in these comas for months at a time, are not faking, though their brains are not damaged. They are described as "“totally passive, immobile, lack[ing] tonus, withdrawn, mute, unable to eat and drink, incontinent and not reacting to physical stimuli or pain.”

One of the children describes feeling as though "he were in a glass box with fragile walls, deep in the ocean. If he spoke or moved, he thought, it would create a vibration, which would cause the glass to shatter. “The water would pour in and kill me,” he said.” The boy has now recovered, after his parents were granted residence permits for the family. This appears to be the only cure for the syndrome. Other children, whose families have been deported, are still in comas in their home country.

The director of a child psychiatry center in Stockholm has proposed that the phenomenon is a kind of "willed dying", and likens it to a syndrome found in some prisoners in Nazi concentration camps who “stopped eating, sat mute and motionless in corners, and expired.”

The phenomenon could perhaps be explained as an extensive vagal shutdown, or freeze response, in which the nervous system shuts down as a response to overwhelming and inescapable stress. Why it's unique to Sweden, nobody knows, except that we do know that different cultures develop their own culturally-specific ways of expressing emotional distress.

It appears that the refugee children in Sweden have developed a new meme for expressing the fear and despair experienced by refugees facing deportation.