From the New Yorker:

THE TRAUMA OF FACING DEPORTATION

LETTER FROM SWEDEN APRIL 3, 2017 ISSUE

In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children have fallen unconscious after being informed that their families will be expelled from the country.

By Rachel Aviv

Uppgivenhetssyndrom , or resignation syndrome, is said to exist only in Sweden, and only among refugees. The patients seem to have lost the will to live. “They are like Snow White,” a doctor said. “They just fall away from the world.”

… The apathetic children began showing up in Swedish emergency rooms in the early two-thousands. …

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the medical journal Acta Pædiatrica, Bodegård described the typical patient as “totally passive, immobile, lacks tonus, withdrawn, mute, unable to eat and drink, incontinent and not reacting to physical stimuli or pain.”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 country’s definition of political refugees had recently narrowed. Families fleeing countries that were not at war were often denied asylum.

In an open letter to the Swedish minister of migration, forty-two psychiatrists asserted that the new restrictions on asylum seekers and the time it took the Migration Board to process their applications—children could be in limbo for years—were causing the disease. They accused the government of “systematic public child abuse.” …

Five of Sweden’s seven political parties demanded amnesty for apathetic patients. … The board began allowing apathetic children and their families to stay.

… In Nigeria, students who can’t retain information and report feeling a burning sensation in their heads are sometimes given a diagnosis of “brain fag.” The illnesses are reinforced by a local belief that the symptoms are a sign of authentic suffering, worthy of expert attention and care.

The Swedish government’s report proposed that the apathetic children were from “holistic cultures,” where it is “difficult to draw boundaries between the individual’s private sphere and the collective domain.” They were sacrificing themselves for their family by losing consciousness. “Even if no direct encouragement or directive is given,” the report said, “many children raised with holistic thinking may nonetheless act according to the group’s ‘unspoken’ rules.”

The report seemed to ignore the influence of Sweden’s own culture on the illness. When the Swedish government sent doctors and sociologists to visit Kosovo, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, to find out if the illness was a culturally specific way of reacting to trauma, local doctors said that they had never heard of such symptoms. …