Women and girls in Afghanistan, where the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban has taken power, are trembling in fear of another epidemic other than COVID-19 and monkey pox. In particular, in girls’ schools, students collectively lose consciousness and fall, convulsions and paralysis symptoms. In Afghanistan, it is said that it is a collective poisoning phenomenon caused by the release of poison by armed groups that are hostile to each other, and uses it to attack political opponents. However, external experts believe that somatoform disorder, in which extreme stress is converted into a physical abnormality, is a group psychogenic disease, an online scientific journal Undark recently reported.
Patients with somatic dysmorphic disorder experience physical pain even though there is no apparent physical cause. It is also called a conversion disorder because it presents with somatic symptoms that mimic neurological disorders. Symptoms often follow periods of significant emotional or physical distress, which are outside the individual’s conscious control.
These conversion disorders often affect many people at once. Symptoms spread through a group or group without an apparent pathogen, toxin, or other physical cause, also known as mass psychogenic disease (also known as mass social disease, mass psychogenic disorder, epidemic hysteria, or mass hysteria) It is said to occur when there is an obvious threat, such as the stench of a school that fears
Despite extensive records and decades of research around the world, the specific causes and mechanisms of collective mental illness have not been elucidated. This is particularly the case in Afghanistan, where the presence of women in public places has been almost erased. Even direct observation of the patient is difficult. However, through interviews with doctors, sociologists, and women who have observed these symptoms, it is confirmed that many women and girls in a country ravaged by war since 2004 are suffering from the disease.
In the western Afghan province of Herat alone, there have been tens of thousands of cases in the past decade. The city’s hospitals overflowed with girls with severe dizziness and weakness, hyperventilation, headache, fever, nausea and abdominal pain. In some cases, there is a loss of consciousness and no physical reaction. Doctors can’t find a physical cause, so they send him to Herat State Hospital, one of only six mental disorders in the country. Most of the patients who received intravenous injections, anti-anxiety drugs, sedatives, or electroshock therapy thereafter regain consciousness 24 hours later and are sent home.
According to Dr. Wahid Nourjad, a psychiatrist who has been working in the psychiatric ward of Herat Hospital for over 10 years, the symptoms began to be reported in 2004, but the incidence increased after the Taliban took power in August 2021. The number of female patients who showed these symptoms and were brought to this hospital’s women’s change increased from 10,800 in 2020 to 12,678 in 2021. In April of this year, the number of patients exceeded 900. “Being a girl in Afghanistan comes with pressures that no one other than a girl in Afghanistan can understand,” said Dr. Norzad.
So far, tens of thousands of cluster psychogenic diseases in Afghanistan show the same pattern. Mass outbreaks, raucous media reports, and the shift from the Taliban in the past to the actions of opposing militants now. For example, in 2011, when 30 students from a girls’ school in the village of Abul Walid, about a 45-minute drive from the city center of Herat, had a cluster outbreak, they were driven by the Taliban. In 2012, more than 170 women and girls in Tahar province had a cluster outbreak after drinking water from a school well, which was said to be the result of poisoning them, but the NATO laboratory in Kabul, the capital, found no traces of the poison in the water. .
A 2012 World Health Organization (WHP) report found that 22 girls’ schools had mass poisoning. And an investigation by Newsweek, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force found no evidence of toxins or poisoning in at least 200 water, urine or blood samples. Instead, investigators concluded that the girls were suffering from a group psychogenic disorder.
Group psychogenic diseases have been reported in dozens of countries around the world. In 2011, when a teenage girl in New York City, Han Mouri, had convulsions and developed vocal tics, it sparked media attention, arguing that it might be due to environmental toxins, but was diagnosed as group psychosexuality. This disease is often associated with the experience of extreme stress in the bonsai area. Similar symptoms occurred in thousands of Albanian high school students in Kosovo in 1990, and in 1983, 943 teenagers living on the West Bank of the Jordan River in Israel complained of group fainting and dizziness.
Dr. Robert E. Bartholomew, a medical sociologist at the University of Auckland, USA, who published a study on the disease in Afghanistan, said that Afghanistan, after decades of war, is a hotbed of collective psychogenic disease. He said that in 2015, at the request of the Afghan government, an analysis of thousands of suspected poisoning cases in Afghanistan showed that most of them were diagnosed as group psychogenic diseases, which recovered quickly without symptoms of poisoning.
Patricia Omidian, a medical anthropologist at Focusing Initiative International, a non-profit organization that has been caring for Afghan women locally, said the mental health risks for women in a war-torn country since the 1970s are significant. “I can’t say I’m free from it,” he said, adding that women in Afghanistan are at greater risk of mental illness because of the large segregation in both the public sphere and the home, and continuing fatigue and malnutrition from household chores.
By Han Gun-pil, reporter [email protected]
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