Istanbul and Uganda

Kathe Kollwitz - The Volunteers. 1921-22, woodcut. Artblog

A couple interesting and insightful articles that I came across today. First, a short piece by Charles Mudede in the Stranger about Istanbul and the Right to the City. I don't always agree with Mudede but I like his perspective on cities, and he makes some important points about how David Harvey/Henri Lefebvre's theories on the right to the city (not just the right to access the city but "the right to change ourselves by changing the city") relate to the current protests in Istanbul.

And NPR ran a story on a new problem for children in Northern Uganda: nodding syndrome. After Years of War, Ugandan Children Face a New Deadly Threat tells the story of a now-three-year-long epidemic of seizures in children in the same communities that were threatened by the LRA (although it is not clear from the article whether the seizures are actually deadly). Despite prolonged testing no causes have been found, and experts are mystified.

Last month I attended a workshop on Healthy Cities for Children, where research on childrens' idioms of distress was presented by Dr. Ria Reis of Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. This may not be the most accurate depiction of her research but this is what I can recall: Idioms of distress is a term used to describe a phenomenon where traumatized children may not have a socially-acceptable means of expressing distress, and as a result may adopt a means of expression that appears as physical distress: nausea, fainting, seizures, etc. In traditional cultures this may be explained as a result of demon possession. There have been numerous cases around the world of epidemics of unusual behavior, which is often interpreted as having a spiritual cause, but when researchers probed further they found common traumatic issues in childrens' pasts, such as sexual abuse. These researchers believe that because children may not be able to adequately express this trauma, they develop physical symptoms which are genuinely felt and not merely affected, and where enough children have had common traumatic experiences, this can turn into an epidemic of sorts.

Although the NPR article only touches on the possibility of a psychological root to the problem (it does observe that locals consider the problem to be spiritual), Dr. Reis and others (Grace Akello and Annemiek Richters) have done research in Northern Uganda, observing similar trends to previous cases of physically-expressed emotional/psychological distress. Their paper is here (although unfortunately it's not free): Silencing distressed children in the context of war in Northern Uganda: An analysis of its dynamics and its health consequences. Another paper by Dr. Reis and Joop de Jong (this one available) to do with idioms of distress is here: Kiyang-yang, A West African post-war idiom of distress.

So since three years of testing have not managed to turn up any diagnosis of an infectious disease, it seems likely that this nodding syndrome is a result of the years of civil war ravaged in the north. Which only illustrates further the tragedy of the conflict. As the NPR article quotes one researcher as saying: "One generation lost due to... the two decade war, and another generation now being lost to nodding syndrome."