Late last month, a young girl was urgently brought to Australia from Nauru, the tiny Pacific island where she was sent to live in offshore immigration detention by the Australian government in 2013.



We don’t know a great deal about this girl, due to a court order and her right to privacy. We don’t know her name, and we don’t know her exact age, other than she is an adolescent; we don’t know from which country her family fled before she was granted refugee status.

What we do know is her health started to deteriorate sharply at the beginning of July. On July 9 she cut her thighs with a razor. The next day, she cut her arms and legs, and was taken to the emergency room at Nauru Hospital. She started refusing food and water.

Notes taken by a psychiatrist on July 25 recorded the girl as not having eaten or drunk anything for six days. Her blood pressure was difficult to measure, her muscle tone abnormally low, and she didn’t respond to a sharp tap just under her knee bone – a test that should, in most people, cause a reflex jerk of the leg.

The girl was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and with resignation syndrome. The latter is a rare and serious psychiatric condition that is perhaps most widely known as the mysterious illness that sent hundreds of refugee children in Sweden into a seemingly unconscious state.

Dr Louise Newman, a professor of psychiatry at Melbourne University and the convenor of advocacy group Doctors for Justice, explained resignation syndrome as a very serious state of withdrawal that traumatised children can go through when they are “overwhelmed by stress”.

“It’s usually been found in situations where there’s no sense of safety around them and they’re traumatised,” she told BuzzFeed News. “It’s a form of escape or dissociation – they go into a state where they look semiconscious. They might start looking depressed, then they become mute, they stop talking. They withdraw, they don’t interact with anyone, they end up taking to their beds and becoming unconscious.”

It is an extreme, protective reaction to trauma, Newman said, but also very dangerous, as without care and treatment, kids can die.

“It’s like going into hibernation,” she said. “The world is too hard.”