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OOn April 30, 1954, Major Henry A. Segal, a US Army doctor, wrote a report describing a strange "syndrome" that had hit POW camps during the Korean War. The men stopped eating, consumed only cold water and stopped talking about the future. They were just waiting to die.
"With the passage of time, they withdrew more and more from all contacts and became silent and motionless," reads the report. "Finally, they turned their faces to the wall and died. From the beginning of the first symptom until death, it took three weeks, almost to the day. "
Segal finally called this syndrome "abandonment". John Leach Ph.D., a visiting scholar at the University of Portsmouth in England and a former military psychologist, calls it "psychogenic death," but admits that "giving -up-itis" is sadly accurate:
"Basically, it's a horrible term," says Leach Reverse. "But it's a descriptive term. There were always those people who had just left – curled up, lying down and dead. In many cases, they were healthy men and women, and what stood out was that their death was fundamentally inexplicable. But it seems that there is an underlying organic cause.
Leach recently published an article that suggests a potential explanation of what is happening in our brain when we sink into deadly desperation. Although this illness may look like depression at first, says Leach, but he thinks there is actually a separate brain mechanism, making it a completely different condition.
The feeling of non-escape
Leach has not yet tested his hypothesis with clinical trials or brain scans. His analysis is therefore based on the search for common points between historical narratives, interviews with survivors of traumatic events (prisoners of war, survivors, etc.). Together, he suggests that abandonment is a dangerous manifestation of life. survival instinct of the brain that went wrong.
This process begins with the feeling that everything is lost – similar to what you might feel when you know the ship is falling and you are stuck under the bridge. Studies in animals have suggested that the brain reacts to this by releasing a large amount of dopamine. Curiously, a neurotransmitter usually plays a role in the brain's reward system.
"What happens is that if you are in a stressful or life-threatening situation, the production of dopamine in the anterior cingulate circuit increases. And then, once this situation is removed or you get out of it, the dopamine is lowered, "says Leach. But soon after this peak, another brain mechanism tries to slow down the flow of the neurotransmitter.
"If this stressful situation persists, the pre-frontal cortex inhibits dopamine production and reduces it to a lower level than normal," he continues. "If you have a dopamine motivation in this circuit, you start to see the types of behavior that are registered in case itis dropped."
Five step progression
Leach explains that this low dopamine production is probably responsible for the progression of the symptoms he noticed during his passage through the stories of atrocities of Korea to the first British colonies of Jamestown. His article suggests that when dopamine levels drop, patients will experience five stages of symptoms.
First, patients tend to withdraw from their peers – such as soldiers from Korean POW camps who "have been lying down in the confines of their shelter," according to Segal's report. Then came apathy, or a reluctance to bathe or dress – which he noticed in the accounts of many survivors of the concentration camps during the Second World War, in addition to the Korean stories .
The third stage of the Leach model already has a clinical name, aboulia, described as a clinical absence of will or inability to act decisively. Other articles, in addition to those of Leach, indicate that this disease is sometimes followed by akésie, a syndrome generally observed in patients with advanced Parkinson's disease who eventually lose the ability to move voluntarily. .
Leach based these five categories on historical case studies and observations from a series of articles that linked them to the deregulation of dopamine in the brain. But where his model is different, it's that he groups them as the progression of a single syndrome, give up-itis.
"I think what we're looking at here is a unique spectrum, not unique categories," he says. "If you notice a slight decrease in dopamine levels, you get a demotivation and depression. The lower the level of dopamine, the more intense the symptoms. "
Leach's document is somewhere between a history lesson and a scientific article, and he admits that he will have to test this model to confirm it. But he is also aware of the delicate nature of this research. Confirming this work will likely force people to relive intense trauma, or require the cooperation of people who are experiencing a tragedy, both high orders in themselves.
But in the meantime, he is excited about the potential of his model, which is ready to answer questions raised more than fifty years ago.
"The question I should have asked was: why did so many people die when they did not have to die?" "It was the elephant in the room that was not going away."
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