A Movie (Life Overtakes Me), Refugee Children and Resigned Bodies

Abstract

This study focuses on the traumas of child refugees through the documentary film Life Overtakes Me (John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson, 2019). The film deals with the resignation syndrome seen in refugee children in Sweden. Resignation/abandonment syndrome, called uppgivenhetssyndrom in Swedish, is defined as the loss of the desire of child patients to live. Completely passive, motionless, introverted, silent, incapable of eating, unable to hold urine, not responding to physical stimulation or pain, these children fall into a kind of coma. The disease, first seen in the early 2000s, is known to affect more than 400 children aged between 8 and 15 within ten years. According to psychiatrists who accuse the government of systematic public child exploitation, this discomfort/disease arose as a reaction to two traumas: The harassment/traumas that children experience in their home country, and the fear of returning again after getting used to Sweden. Parallel to the narrowing in the definition of a political refugee, the refusal of asylum requests from non-war countries triggers this fear. Similar cases have been reported not only in Sweden but in refugee camps on Australia’s Nauru Island and Greece’s Lesbos Island, which have pursued a tough border policy. This study claims that the symptoms seen in these children, whose tests revealed no brain lesions, can be explained in a cultural context. It tries to base this on the narrative of the documentary film and expert opinions. Given the increase in the number of child refugees over the past ten years, the findings, which will be revealed through the film Life Overtakes Me, are considered important.