PEACETIME VICTIMS OF WAR

Vietnam Syndrome in Vojvodina

Accoridng to world statistics, suicide rate rises at the time of war, but directly the opposite happened in Vojvodina: the figure of 700 suicides annually shows that there is an increase by one third in comparison to the time of peace

AIM, Novi Sad, March 7, 1996

The war is over. Psychiatrists will now have plenty of work on their hands.

After everything that has happened in the past several years in Serbia, almost noone has remained the same. Major national objectives justified by occult arguments, dissolution of the state, mobilization and forcing men into an undeclared war whose objectives were carefully concealed (in which "Serbia has never participated"), massive and accelerated impoverishment of the population, the campaign of robbing the already robbed nation of everything left, infatuation by propagandist television - these are all fragments of a picture of mass misfortune: death, forcible moving of people, flights, homelessness, general defeat which is in the end proclaimed to be a victory according to a mythical pattern.

Vojvodina always ranked high according to the number of attempted and successful suicides. In the very beginning of the war massive mobilization went on in its space, during the war it was mercilessly impoverished, and towards the end of the war it was methodically demographically, sociologically and culturally changed (having received 400 thousand refugees and banished persons from all Serb lands). Who has after all that managed to remain "with psychological and physical powers intact" will for a long time be a topic to be considered by the psychiatrists, just as psychiatrists will for long continue to search for the answer to the question: how the Pannonian depression in association with post-traumatic stress disorders (known by the world for decades as the "Vietnam syndrome") crushes people?

The term post-traumatic stress disorder is defined by psychiatrists as "psychological consequences of endured stresses of various origins". Stress due to daily quarrels with the superior at work, or due to a divorce is not included in this. The problem was first registered in psychiatric references in the end of last century, and it was studied the most by the Americans after their return from Vietnam in a research of the "Vietnam syndrome" in hospitals of 28 urban regions of the USA. Here, reference to it - although not especially loud - started after Vukovar, when young men returned from the hell of Slavonian mire, and Balasevic wrote a ballad about a man with the moon in his eyes (you don't know what it means to demolish a city...").

Characteristic of the post-traumatic syndrome is that it is a cosequence of an exceptionally powerful psychological trauma (avoided death, death of a close person, watching tortures...), that it appears subsequently (after a month or even several months) and that it changes the man affected by it. Nightmares, excessive fear, depression, frequent "flash-backs", suicidal ideas are some of the symptoms of the illness. Very often, persons who have suffered a powerful stress, try to suppress these feelings and states with alcohol, narcotics or suicide.

Dr. Slavica Selakovic from the Psychiatric Department of the Clinical Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital of the Medical School in Novi Sad explains that there are 33 suicides among 100 thousand inhabitants (that is, 700 suicides annually among the two million inhabitants of Vojvodina). Dr. Selakovic warns that in 1993 and 1994, the number of persons in hospitals treated for attempted suicide decreased, but the number of actual suicides increased by one third in these two years. A similar disharmony between hospital statistics and reality exists with the so-called addiction diseases: there are less alcoholics and drug addicts in the hospitals than in the streets, and an everyday walk down a street proves that drug addiction has acquired proportions of an epidemic, and nothing to say about alcohol about which the Balkan space is traditionally tolerant.

World statistics indicate that during wars the number of persons who take their own lives usually declines, while here something quite the opposite happened. An investigation is under way - a kind of psychological autopsy of suicide - the preliminary results of which from the ground warn that there are more elderly persons (over 65 of age) among the suicides, that reasons for suicide are not visible, but that the social climate obviously has suicidal effects. It is assumed that the economic crisis is one of the causes of the increased number of suicides among the elderly population.

The war has brought weapons and added another black detail to the statistical scene: before the war in Vojvodina only five per cent of the suicides were committed by firearms, while nowadays one fifth of suicides, mostly young men, end their life in this way. Suicides with hand bombs are especially drastic. They are frequent among men who have returned from the battlegrounds, which is interpreted by the physicians as a reproach to the society for unawarded "heroism", disappointment and ungracious attitude of the environment towards the warriors, but also as an efficient method of taking one's (own) life learnt in the battlefield.

Memories of a series of killings in Vojvodina (and Hungary) that Marinko Magda - who has both a criminal dossier and experience from the battleground - is tried for are still fresh, and a few days ago in Futog a whole family (a pregnant woman, her husband and a three-and-a-half year old child) were murdered in cold blood. Nobody heard anything, the victims were found a day later. The murderer, or murderers, had 25 hours to disappear. A few days prior to this crime, in a building in Novi Sad, a tenant entered the elevator, an unknown man approached him, asked whether the elevator was going up, and having obtained an affirmative answer, he fired his gun. The man who was shot at is getting better at the Surgery Department of Novi Sad Hospital. A boy of fifteen fired. He confessed several rapes as well. A married couple was killed in Subotica.

The war has obviously devalued life. There are too many weapons, and the dramatic rule that a rifle which appears on the stage in the first act must go off in the third has become a shabby cliche and an almost distasteful warning. Taking people to the battleground without any health check-ups whatsoever, and an excess of arms, is returning like a boomerang.

In all previous investigations of post-traumatic stress disorders in the world, psychiatrists and psychologists succeeded in defining trauma by type, duration and intensity. Idisyncrasy of this space is a kind of a poly-trauma - stress of an undefined type, indefinite duration and unknown intensity "fills the glass" and the man breaks down. Extreme cases (murders, suicides, alcoholism, drug addiction) are visible, but they are just the tip of an iceberg. At its bottom is collective acceptance of depression (that is, of illness) as normal. People become insensible and with no initiative, they cease to be aware that "this is not normal", which leads to general insensibility of the society.

To a question how this state should be cured, there is practically no answer. Consequences of the unpleasant psychological experience could be less serious if there were more hope in the social background, and that which used to be called happiness in the former life. However, there is no such thing in sight nowadays.

And psychological trauma which is not dismantled and which may last for decades, psychiatrists claim, are a foundation for new conflicts.

(AIM) Milena Putnik