1491 – Psychogenic Mental Disorders In Women - Mothers Of Dead Military Man: a New Version Of a Depressive Syndrome

Abstract

Modern war, more sophisticated methods of destruction act not only on the psychic of the military, but also on the civilian population, creating new clinical material, relatively unknown in the era of conventional wars. Prolonged reactive depression in mothers and wives of killed military personnel is one of them. The originality and the protracted course of mental state are associated with certain features of trauma. Inability to identify the body of the deceased is a key element of opportunistic situations in further defining the specificity of the clinical picture in patients of this group. The inability to fulfill the prescribed public burial ritual, the potential probability of erroneous report of son's death, the lack of time for lamentation with the body of the deceased, lack of rituals deprives women of important defense mechanisms of grief recovery. According to anamnesis, the inability to implement the ritual of lamentation with the victims caused the onset of anxiety, guilt feelings, burdensome feelings of mental anguish. Later (1-2 years) the status of women was characterized by contradictory combination of anxiety- melancholic background mood, guilt, feeling of internal strain, vague expectations, discomfort feeling of depersonalization.

There are epistemological basis for allocating disorders in separate diagnostic categories:

1. 1. Phantom feelings are quite easily recognized, so that they can be recognized well with high level of consistency between clinicians.

2. 2. According to catamnesis, phantom experiences, welded with a specific, anxiety-melancholic affect tend to protracted, chronic course, maintaining their clinical identity and anguish, torturous content for the person