this is my song

White-breasted Butt Nugget An easy way to identify this dumb nuthatch is to look for the stupid bird in your backyard that spends most of its time upside down. Its diet should be insects and acorns, but this bird is a sucker for free food, so they spend a lot of their time industriously carrying sunflower seeds away from your bird feeder to hide them in random crevices for shame-eating later, when nobody is watching. 

Magnus Wennman for The New Yorker

The Swedish word uppgivenhetssyndrom sounds like what it is: a syndrome in which kids have given up on life. That’s what several hundred children and adolescents have done — literally checked out of the world for months or years. They go to bed and don’t get up. They’re unable to move, eat, drink, speak or respond. All of the victims of the disorder, sometimes called resignation syndrome, have been youngsters seeking asylum after a traumatic migration, mostly from former Soviet and Yugoslav states. And all of them live in Sweden.

Rachel Aviv, a staff writer at The New Yorker, described these children in the April 3, 2017, article “The Trauma of Facing Deportation.”

The story is shocking. It reads like one of those ancient fairy tales where terrible things happen to innocent children. Were you initially skeptical that this was a real disorder?

I first read about it in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. Because I was reading about it in an academic article, I didn’t think to doubt it. But when I met the two girls I wrote about, it felt very strange. There was a sense of unreality. There was a disconnect between how young and healthy, even beautiful, they looked. They looked like they were sleeping. It was a sickening feeling to know that they were in that position for years. People make comparisons to bears hibernating. But humans don’t hibernate. It felt surreal.

Why is this happening to children in Sweden?

Yes, why Sweden? Refugees there are among the best treated in the world. There’s a national conversation about refugees; people are consumed about how best to treat people seeking asylum. People feel a lot of guilt about whether the country is living up to its humanitarian ideals and doing enough.

Immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers all over the world suffer. Has this happened anywhere else?

I’ve not heard of children with these symptoms anywhere else. I have no doubt that children from Syria, for example, are experiencing fears and traumatic reactions, but there is no evidence that they are slipping into this syndrome.