People really die by losing their will to live: a new study defines "abandonment": report

As unscientific as it may seem, the term "give up" is a real term used to describe a medically documented but still poorly understood phenomenon, in which a person who has lost the will to live dies, despite any apparent physiological cause. The condition was first described in US and South Korean soldiers who died in captivity in POW camps during the Korean War. Later, they were Nazi concentration camps based on the memories of the internment survivors.

The common denominator of abandonment cases is that it occurs during a psychologically traumatic situation that seems inevitable. The victim responds to these seemingly hopeless conditions with increasingly extreme apathy; to retire from life around them to the point that they end up completely out of the deadly reel.

However, past observations show that death by abandonment is not inevitable. People have recovered from states identical to those that preceded death in others after someone or something convinced them to engage in reality again.

After reviewing many historical and modern documents, researcher John Leach, a researcher at Portsmouth University, concluded that drug abandonment may be more widespread than previously thought: apparent cases have been reported the elderly and hospitalized patients carry the characteristic characteristics of the condition. In the hope of improving our understanding of this disconcerting situation and, therefore, our ability to bypass it, Leach undertook to provide the first description of its clinical markers. His article, now published in Medical Hypotheses, defines a schema of five phases of abandonment and, as suggested by the name of the forum, makes assumptions about the brain activity that underlies it.

"Psychogenic death is real. This is not a suicide, it is not related to depression, but the act of giving up life and dying in a few days is a very real condition often related to a serious trauma, "Leach said in a statement. with abandonment, it seems that death is the best way to cope with the unbearable tensions of their situation.