When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine, he was not only starting the biggest security crisis in Europe since World War II, but also having an unprecedented impact on the imagination of an entire generation.
Those born in the 1990s, for example, arrived in the world in a post-Cold War period. Those that are described as some of humanity’s greatest horrors, such as the Holocaust, were events generally confined to history books and the works of fiction that recall them.
Reports from dozens of young people and adults of this generation, collected by sheetshow that the most recurrent feelings about the war in Ukraine – which arrives this Monday (21) on the 25th day – are directly related to issues of mental health and emotional well-being.
Dread, anguish, anxiety, hopelessness, uncertainty, fear and sadness were the most common emotions reported to the report through social networks – platforms through which this generation is most informed about the conflict.
“It’s a war in which you have TikTok as a tool,” says Vera Iaconelli, psychoanalyst and columnist for sheet. “There is, on the one hand, an unprecedented experience of access [à informação] via social networks and, on the other, a massacred population with which we specifically identify. That’s why this awareness”, he says.
Iaconelli refers to a conjunction of factors that make the war in Ukraine a warlike event that, in the collective imagination, overlaps with other conflicts that tend to be made invisible. For her, the “shock” of this generation before the scenario reveals, above all, a fundamental alienation, but the fact that most of the victims are white and European ends up forcing a greater identification even in those who are thousands of kilometers from Kiev. or Moscow.
At the same time, rumors about a possible Third World War make conflict a factor of concern that transcends borders and poses a threat to the survival of human beings as a species.
That’s what railroad worker Juan Pablo Neu Rogério, 31, says. From Curitiba, he says he had been following the news about the tension that was growing before Putin’s order to invade Ukraine. He was frightened when the conflict escalated from rhetoric to de facto, and he felt more fear when Russian troops took over the region of the Chernobyl power plant, scene of the worst nuclear accident in history, in 1986.
“It was a moment when I realized that the escalation of the conflict would not take a step back”, says Rogério. “Suddenly, they were already talking about supplying Ukraine with weapons, and the feeling it gave was an inevitable worsening. A feeling of not knowing how things are going to unfold,” he adds.
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Mario Eduardo Costa Pereira, a professor at Unicamp’s School of Medicine, compares the reaction to the war in Ukraine to the behavior seen in response to the Covid pandemic.
“This type of scenario is very contrary to our emotional tendency to close our eyes and try to despise what makes us suffer”, explains the expert.
The generational impact, he says, is also due to the fact that a conflict of this magnitude goes against the prevailing conception of civilization and is now in question. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a definitive solution was proposed, like ‘the world will be just that.’
The idea that civilization was protected, for Pereira, was already open to questioning in the face of the coronavirus crisis and the emergence of climate change.
“Same thing with war, it can end the world. If a plane [russo] crosses the border with Poland and drops a bomb on the other side, we don’t know if it will be dark today”, he says.
Allied to the daily tragedies in the conflict that has killed hundreds of civilians and triggered a migration crisis for millions of refugees, the imminence of a disaster of global proportions is, for Cecilia Decaris, 17, a reason for daily discomfort since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
As part of a generation of digital natives, the advertising student sees social media as both an ally and an enemy in the context of war. The speed with which information circulates allows it to have access to almost everything that happens in Eastern Europe, but it also makes it difficult to control how healthy it is to delve into reports.
For Cecilia, the time to stop was when she saw a photo of a family killed after a Russian attack in Irpin, on the outskirts of Kiev. Since then, she has sought to lessen the consumption of news about the war.
“We watch series, watch movies, read books. We know how wars were in history. But when I see this happening in real life, in the now, I feel terrified in a way I didn’t imagine possible outside of fiction” , it says.
War, like the pandemic, is the kind of situation that makes human finitude sink in, says Iaconelli. “Actually, we can’t imagine our own death. So there are triggers that make us access the fact that we’re going to die, but without us being able to imagine what exactly that would be.”
For the psychoanalyst, however, a type of numbness of the senses can now be repeated even in the face of the conflict still ongoing, similar to a kind of naturalization of the death of Covid victims. “What happens is that life has to go on, and people go on with their lives and desensitize themselves in order to survive.”
