It has been revealed that children from refugee families in Sweden are falling into coma-like states for years, which some scientists are blaming on psychological issues related to the experiences they went through in war and as refugees.
The condition has been labelled as 'resignation syndrome' and means that the children are immobile and in sleep-like states. Despite this, their brains are still operating, and at times they even have the brain-waves of people who are fully awake. The children are fed through tubes and their limbs are kept mobile through physiotherapy.
Between 2003 and 2005, 424 cases of the syndrome were found and hundreds more have been seen since. What baffles scientists is that this condition only seems to affect refugee children in Sweden and nowhere else, there were even cases reported back in Sweden as long ago as the 1990s.
What this means is that while there appears to be some connection to the trauma they suffered as refuges there is also something happening in Sweden that is also affecting the children.
Neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan, who has been investigating the syndrome, told The Times:
"The Children initially became anxious and depressed. Their behaviour changed: they stopped playing with other children and, over time, stopped playing altogether. They slowly withdrew into themselves, and soon they couldn't go to school. They spoke less and less, until they didn't speak at all. Eventually they took to bed. If they entered the deepest stage, they could no longer eat or open their eyes. They became completely immobile… They ceased having any active participation in the world."
"[The children] were traumatised long before they fell ill."
The neurologist also noted that many of them began acting like this when they were going through the asylum process and when it was not certain whether they would be able to stay in Sweden.
One girl who woke from the coma describes it as being like a dream which she never woke from. O'Sullivan described what a boy, another awoken patient, told her:
"He had felt as if 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 condition is still being investigated but is thought perhaps linked to 'pervasive arousal withdrawal syndrome' in which children withdraw due to trauma.
[h/t: The Sun]
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