Abstract

Between 2001 and 2006 there was an ‘epidemic’ of complete withdrawal from daily life among numerous children in refugee families seeking asylum in Sweden. It became embedded in many distinct controversies, including the politics of immigration, and acrimonious disagreements between pediatricians dealing with individual families, and government-employed sociologists commissioned to report on what was going on. Most of the cases resolved themselves when an amnesty was agreed in 2006, although there remain many doubts about the statistics. After describing this phenomenon, the paper proposes a model called Imitation & Internalisation. Most of the children may have begun by imitating others who had fallen ill, but soon internalized it to the extent that it became an integral part of their psychophysical and social constitution. The model can be applied to phenomena as diverse as hypnotism, the placebo effect, and catching faith by association with believers