Delusions of Immortality in a Post-War Society: The Albanian Case.

Abstract

The Albanian society suffered deep changes and restructuring immediately following WWII. And as if it were not enough, the society was shaken up for decades thereafter. The population was forced to live in a constant collective psychosis of war, with an imaginary ‘enemy’ continuously at the gate, apart from multiple everyday restrictions and an almost complete isolation from the neighboring countries (1, 2). The Second World War (WWII) in the form it affected Albania, with subsequent invasions of fascist Italians and Nazi Germans, was almost simultaneously tinged with the colors of a civil war. Border skirmishes with Yugoslav partisans took place in the northern areas, sometimes corresponding with the crimes perpetrated from communist Albanians themselves. These factors, along with the Italian–Greek war whose hostilities happened partially on Albanian soil, have obviously rendered the theme of war, martyrs, heroes, and survivors, a highly popular one as part of the public political discourse (2, 3). The moment when communists started ruling Albania might appear to coincide historically with the end of the Second World War; instead the psychological state of war induced by the regime was obviously not over. The psychosis of the war kept on looming with ebbs and tides for more than forty years (1945–1990), and has almost always been present in the psychological and physical environment, and unrelentingly broadcasted by official mass media (4). The psychiatric and mental consequences in individuals following war, post-war, chronic exposure to hostilities, ill-treatment, and torture related to belligerencies, have been studied among Holocaust survivors (5). Other authors have enlarged their scope of study, and even of the diagnostic notions depicting war-related disorders (6, 7). However, large-scale studies on war impact are usually limited to a simple PTSD model of impact, without consideration of the complex impact of an imaginary of impending war, leading to continuous fear, avoidance behavior, and maladaptive coping styles that will potentially affect generations of a post-war society, even when there is overlapping symptomatology between PTSD and this complex changes in the large group's members (8).