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 They are described as "“totally passive, immobile, lack[ing] tonus, withdrawn, mute, unable to eat and drink, incontinent and not reacting to physical stimuli or pain.”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.

The Algonquin Concept of Wetiko

I've just found out about a concept I sorely needed, in order to account for the state of our planet, where 8 men own half the wealth, and the very ecosystem is in peril due to human greed. It's the Algonquin concept of wetiko (also called wendigo or windigo).

"Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit or thought-form driven by greed, excess and selfish consumption. It deludes its host into believing that consuming the life force of others for self-aggrandizement or profit is a logical and morally upright way to live."

The wetiko, or windigo, is like the hungry ghost in Chinese tradition: always starving, never sated. It's continually looking for new victims. Whenever a windigo devours another person, it grows in proportion to the meal it has just consumed, so it can never be sated. What a metaphor for capitalism, with its insane imperative for continual growth in a context of finite and almost exhausted resources.

Some native traditions believe that humans who become overpowered by greed can turn into wendigos, and that environmental destruction and insatiable greed are caused by wendigos:

"Every time someone is seen justifying the destruction of life for profit—it is wetiko.
Every time compassion is vitally missing during a time of suffering—it is wetiko.
Every time a privileged person uses another as a “throw away” toy—it is wetiko.
Every time, in every way a community or country is impoverished so that others can be rich – it is wetiko."

Externalizing a mindset by personifying it in this way helps draw our attention to our own behaviour. That's if you think this is a metaphor. Maybe it's literally true, and wetikos are out there, taking over peoples' minds and causing them to indulge in mad destruction. Personally, I don't have a better explanation for what's happening.

You can read a searing account of the mindset of colonization as wetiko, in Columbus and Other Cannibals, by Native American author Jack Forbes.