WE COULD NOT HAVE ANTICIPATED THAT – NOT EVEN IN OUR DREAMS

Text topic: Culture and National Trauma

Text author: Jован Мирић

This paper presents mental disorders of the Serbs caused by war actions from Balkan Wars to the wars at the end of the last century. Both the stress/traumatic events (war actions, camps, refugees) and changes in the forms of mental disorders (war tremors in the First World War, partisan hysteria in the partisan war and the post-traumatic stress disorder in the wars of the 1990s) are listed. A huge lack of data for special categories of population is evident for the First World War (civil victims, Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina) and for the Second World War (members of the King’s Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, detainees in German and other camps, civilians in the war and after the war). The data show that the most severe psychological consequences, in addition to the horrors of war, were caused by torture in the camps and prisons of war