Category: News

WARSAW — For the past seven weeks, Dr. Simona Neliubsiene has struggled to focus on her patients’ charts, distracted by images of bombed cities flashing in her head.

At night, she lies awake in bed, her heart thumping, frantically doom-scrolling through the latest news about Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“I never had anxiety attacks before,” said Dr. Neliubsiene, a family physician in Kaunas, Lithuania. “But after the first week of the war, I started thinking that maybe I should take some of the pills that I am prescribing to my patients.”

Many Eastern Europeans feel intimately connected to the conflict in their region. Although the violence has not yet spilled outside Ukraine, some people in neighboring countries said they were making detailed war contingency plans — just in case. They complained that they were unable to escape the relentless news coverage.

Some even said they were afraid to fall asleep.

Their anxiety may be deeply rooted, and even prompted by generational trauma.

Because of the proximity of the war in Ukraine, some Eastern Europeans are afraid of getting pulled into the fight. Images of the bloodshed only hundreds of miles away are dredging up painful memories of atrocities committed by Russian soldiers during World War II and the Soviet occupation in this part of the world years ago.

And there are about four million Ukrainian refugees now in the region whose suffering is a constant reminder of how real — and how close — this war is.

The images of atrocities attributed to Russian soldiers in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, pouring out of news media outlets, have only compounded these feelings.

“When I saw those images, I was not able to move,” Dr. Neliubsiene said. “My family did not get supper that evening.”

According to interviews with over a dozen mental health professionals and patients from Eastern Europe, there has been a surge in profound anxiety, as well as in requests for sleeping pills and calls to crisis hotlines.

“This is a raw existential crisis,” said Sara Koszeg, a psychologist from Budapest, who started a project documenting people’s nightmares about the war. “And it has a biological effect: You are alert all the time, and this affects your sleep.”

Katarzyna Skorzynska, 34, a fashion designer from Warsaw, said she kept waking up at 4 a.m., hours before she normally starts her day.

“I have been feeling overwhelmed and helpless,” she said. “Once I wake up, it is very difficult to fall back asleep. My thoughts are racing.”

And it does not help that she starts her day by looking at the news. “Wake up, check on Zelensky, coffee: This has been my morning routine,” she said, referring to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, whose face has dominated Polish news media since the war began in February.

Staying updated on the latest war developments has become a bit of an obsession for some, who hope that doing so will make them feel like they are more in control. But the reality is that it has had the exact opposite effect.

Vytenis Deimantas, 29, a social scientist from Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, said that he had trouble falling and staying asleep, but that even when he takes sleeping pills, he wakes up after only about five hours. Then, he rolls over, grabs his phone and scrolls through news websites. “There is a feeling of powerlessness,” he said. “And the more you think about it, the stronger it is.”

Mr. Deimantas said he had never had trouble sleeping before, but now he lies awake worrying about the possibility of a nuclear strike — and of a nuclear cloud drifting over from Ukraine.

These worries may have been passed down. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the Communist authorities sent Mr. Deimantas’s father to the nuclear site to clean up and guard the area surrounding the damaged reactor. The episode has left a grave and long-lasting mark on his mental and physical health.

On the night that Russian forces took over the nuclear plant, at the start of the war, Mr. Deimantas kept obsessing about his bedroom windows, which he usually leaves open. “I kept thinking: If I don’t close them, what happens if the Russian army does something?” he said.

Psychologists say that the challenge of anxiety is that people worry about things that are out of their control. And one of the most frequent symptoms of anxiety is insomnia.

Dr. Neliubsiene has been swamped with requests from patients experiencing insomnia and anxiety. She has been prescribing them muscle relaxants for short-term use, and has been recommending physical activity, reduced screen time and fixed routines. One of her patients, a woman in her 50s, told her she was afraid to fall asleep. “She said, ‘What if Putin invades while I am sleeping?’” Dr. Neliubsiene recalled.

Of course, many people have already been on tenterhooks for more than two years amid the coronavirus pandemic, psychologists said, making them all the more vulnerable to anxiety attacks in reaction to what is happening in Ukraine.

“We are definitely getting many more phone calls,” said Tomasz Gorecki, a psychologist and the coordinator of Poland’s main crisis hotline.

The entirety of Eastern Europe seems to be enveloped in the war. In Warsaw, which has seen an influx of Ukrainian refugees, it is as likely to hear Polish as it is Ukrainian. Shops and restaurants display Ukrainian flags. Cultural venues have been transformed into aid centers and shelters.

Mental health professionals say that one way to feel more in control and ease anxiety is to help someone else.

But even as helping those directly affected by the war diminishes feelings of powerlessness, it also brings people face to face with the refugees’ suffering — and exposes them to vicarious trauma.

Ms. Skorzynska, the fashion designer from Warsaw, described a feeling of profound sadness after assisting refugees. “You genuinely realize that it could have been us,” she said. “That this is all happening just next door.”

That sort of realization has led many people to seriously consider the possibility that they might have to flee their homes. Families in Poland and Lithuania said they discussed which art pieces were valuable enough to take with them and which routes would quickly get them to safer countries.

And then there are those across Eastern Europe who have already witnessed the savageries of war.

Dr. Irena Dziewonska, 82, a pediatrician living in Warsaw, said that one of her earliest memories was of hiding in a basement with her parents during World War II. As a young child, she said, she saw people being shot at and heard women being assaulted.

Since the war began in Ukraine, all of those memories have come rushing back, Dr. Dziewonska said, and she has been struggling to sleep, eat or think of anything else.

“This is just dreadful to have to experience this for the second time in a lifetime,” she said.

Research suggests that trauma can be passed down generation to generation. Bodies retain physiological imprints of traumatic memories, which can be reactivated by stressful events.

“I realized I can be afraid of things that my ancestors experienced,” said Dr. Neliubsiene, the Lithuanian physician. A member of her family was raped during World War II, she said, and she described “a terrible, gut-rotating feeling” when she saw news reports of Ukrainian women being sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers during this war.

This personal experience of war has made the violence in Ukraine particularly vivid and painful across generations of Eastern Europeans.

Whenever Dr. Dziewonska closes her eyes, she sees the burning Warsaw of her childhood.

“I am trembling all the time,” she said. “I keep on thinking: They will come here again, and I will be in that basement again.”

After being held in jail for close to four years awaiting trial on charges of aiding militants, the Kashmiri journalist Aasif Sultan was granted bail by the courts last week, and he thought he could finally return home to his wife and his daughter, who was just 6 months old when he was arrested.

But the Indian authorities didn’t let him go, levying similar charges under a different law, and have since moved him to a different jail.

Mr. Sultan’s case is the latest instance, rights activists say, in which the Indian authorities have weaponized the legal system to limit free speech and harass journalists, particularly those in the Indian-controlled portion of the disputed Kashmir region. Some have been arrested under laws that allow people to be held for extended periods without trial, and that make bail terms extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible.

Mr. Sultan is now being held under the stringent Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, a preventive detention law that lets the region’s authorities keep a suspect in jail for a maximum of two years — without any formal criminal charges being filed, and so without any trial and with no hope for bail — if local authorities contend that the person presents a security risk or a threat to public order.

Activists argue that the law violates international human rights, and lawyers say the Indian authorities have used it to round up Kashmiris posing no threat of violence, including journalists, students and those with sizable political or economic sway in the region.

“The Public Safety Act is based on the apprehension that one may do something illegal and not that one may have done something illegal,” said Shafqat Nazir, a lawyer who practices at the High Court of Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city. “Just on the basis of an apprehension, one can rot in jail for two years.”

Mr. Sultan’s experience — a detention extended either just after a court grants bail or just before a bail hearing — has become a pattern, applied against at least two other Kashmiri journalists arrested in recent months.

Fahad Shah, the editor in chief of a news website called The Kashmir Walla, was first arrested in February. He has been arrested three times since then, with the authorities bringing new charges as soon as he received bail in the previous ones.

And Sajad Gul, a trainee reporter for The Kashmir Walla, was arrested on Jan. 5 for uploading a video he had recorded of the family of a slain militant in which they were displaying anti-India slogans, the police said, according to local media reports. He got bail 10 days later. But before he was released, the authorities informed him that he would continue to be held under the Public Safety Act.

Activists point to the government’s grounds for detaining Mr. Shah, who has reported widely on Kashmir for international publications, as evidence of how loosely the Indian government interprets the Public Safety Act to silence journalists.

Mr. Shah was described by the police as an “anti-national element under the cover of journalism” who is “continuously propagating stories which are against the interest and security of the nation.”

Yashraj Sharma, who has been leading The Kashmir Walla since Mr. Shah’s detention, said the government’s practice of arrests, then rearrests, was sending a chilling message to journalists.

“Every time we hit the publish button, we are not sure if that particular story will land us in jail the next day,” Mr. Sharma said. “Regional media has been squished.”

The New York Times made multiple requests for comment on how the Public Safety Act was being used in the region, to India’s Home Ministry, the governor of Jammu and Kashmir, the police and the offices of two district magistrates.

One district magistrate, in Bandipora, responded but did not divulge details of Mr. Gul’s case, citing privacy concerns. He said, without offering evidence, that the Public Safety Act was not “being used to silence the media or critics” and that there were “so many journalists working freely in our district.”

Across India, activists, writers, students, academics and journalists have complained of an increased climate of intimidation as the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in power since 2014, seeks to stifle its critics.

Charges of sedition, under a law that dates to the British colonial era, have been on the rise in recent years. Thousands of people, including poets, political organizers and a Catholic priest, have been jailed under an antiterrorism law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. That law, the one under which Mr. Sultan was originally detained, does require that a trial ultimately be held and does allow for bail, though it can take years for it to be granted.

But in Kashmir, it is the Public Safety Act that is used more often to silence dissenters, including minors, in part, the law’s critics say, because it invests so much authority in the region’s government and is subject to so little judicial oversight.

Kashmiri journalists have long found themselves in a precarious situation, squeezed between violent militants seeking independence and the Indian government, which has tried to keep the largely Muslim region under a tight grip.

But rights activists say the clampdown on Kashmir’s media has intensified since 2019, when Mr. Modi’s government revoked the state’s special status, which had given it a degree of autonomy, and dissolved its elected government, bringing the region under direct control of the federal government.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has repeatedly called for the immediate and unconditional release of Mr. Sultan.

A retired police official defended the use of the Public Safety Act.

“It is not fair to say that the law is arbitrary,” said Shesh Paul Vaid, the head of the police in Jammu and Kashmir from 2016 to 2018. “Hundreds of journalists are working there. If these three have been slapped with P.S.A., it means the authorities must have information on how they could be a threat to the security of the country or to law and order.”

Mr. Vaid added that an advisory board, headed by a retired judge, must assess the government’s case for detention within three months.

Both the highest court in Jammu and Kashmir and India’s Supreme Court can overturn detentions under the act. “In so many cases the P.S.A. detention has been quashed by higher courts,” Mr. Vaid said.

Mr. Sultan, who has been a journalist for more than a decade, was arrested in 2018 and charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act after writing an article on Burhan Wani, a top commander of the banned Kashmiri militant group Hizbul Mujahideen, who was killed by the Indian security forces in 2016. His death was followed by protests and clashes, among the worst in the restive region in years.

The authorities accused Mr. Sultan of harboring militants and of helping the Hizbul Mujahideen, which the government considers a terrorist organization, carry out militant activities, according to his lawyer, Adil Abdullah Pandit. But Mr. Pandit convinced a special court that the government’s evidence was weak, and Mr. Sultan, who has denied the government’s accusations, was ordered released on bail.

The local authorities then immediately made the case to hold him under the Public Safety Act. The police claimed he was “planning to again indulge in illegal/anti-national activities” and said his detention was warranted “to prevent the society from violence, strikes, economic adversity and social indiscipline.”

On Monday morning, as it was confirmed that Mr. Sultan was still not coming home, his father, Muhammad, and his daughter, Areeba Aasif, now 4, were waiting outside the police station where he was being held. The elder Mr. Sultan said he had seen his son, but was not allowed to speak to him.

“My wife does not cry anymore. She used to cry a lot,” said the elder Mr. Sultan. “She was eagerly waiting for her son’s return. We all were.”

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.

To the Editor:

Re “College Has Become the Default. Let’s Rethink That,” by John McWhorter (Opinion, April 7):

I was puzzled and disappointed by Dr. McWhorter’s essay. Puzzled by his assumption that so many students are biding their time until they get that “piece of paper” so they can get a job. Disappointed by his cheerleading for a less educated America.

Of course college isn’t for everyone, and not everyone needs to go to college to be educated. He shared about his college experience. I’d like to share mine.

I went to Brooklyn College. I majored in media, having found the mini-series “Roots” to be a life-changing experience. I took a psychology class and fell in love with the subject, so I majored in that too. I wondered about health science and took a course in that, and I learned why eating healthily matters. I learned in biology how to understand how my body works, making me an educated patient. And perhaps as important as all those things, I took history and political science and learned what it means to be an informed citizen.

I do not understand Dr. McWhorter’s attitude toward higher education. Learning to think critically about health and politics and having empathy for other cultures are important for everyone. College may not be the best way to do it for everyone. But his downgrading of the value of a four-year degree misses the whole point of college. It is to become an educated adult and citizen.

Elaine Edelman
East Brunswick, N.J.

To the Editor:

As the executive director of a foundation that supports programs designed to strengthen early childhood education, I have viewed with dismay kindergarten classrooms festooned with pennants from Ivy League colleges. I agree with John McWhorter’s premise: A college education isn’t required to prepare someone for a successful career!

Years ago what was called “vocational education” was valued and available to high school students, but it seems to have fallen out of fashion in favor of four more years of what may be unfocused study. Technical education should be available to students who become plumbers, electricians, computer technicians and other tradespeople who are essential contributors to our everyday lives, but who may not need to read the Great Books to have successful careers.

Deborah Breznay
New York

To the Editor:

The headline of John McWhorter’s column buries the lead. The main takeaway should emphasize a proposal by Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, that kids spend their last two years in high school on a track termed “early college.” Assuming that this means a richer and more intellectually demanding curriculum than usual, I’m all for it. Early college would give these students a better sense of what a college education is, and, maybe, should be. The decision to continue would be better informed.

Dissing college has been fashionable for some time now, particularly among those who choose to measure its value through a cost-benefit analysis. A college education can lead to a job, but it is not the same as a trade school certificate. Those who choose a college education should do so for the education, mostly to explore subjects previously not available in high school. If more of these subjects can be offered in the 11th and 12th grades, that’s wonderful.

Concentrate on revamping the high school curriculum for today’s students, and the issue of college as the default will take care of itself.

Robert S. Cole Jr.
Washington

To the Editor:

John McWhorter is correct. Many students arriving on campus do not know what college has to offer them or even why they are there except that it’s “the next step.” And too many never take advantage of the opportunities available on campus. But that doesn’t mean students shouldn’t bother attending college and instead rely on distance (or other alternative forms of) learning.

Rather, pre-college education should prepare students for the opportunities afforded by further quality education; college brochures and tours should foreground the means and the rewards of learning to think deeply about many topics; and, most important, faculty and staff on campus should work to ensure that every enrolled student can explore new areas and graduate better equipped to deal with work, civic and personal responsibilities.

Howard Gardner
Cambridge, Mass.
The writer is a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-author of “The Real World of College.”

To the Editor:

Colleges and universities have contributed significantly to the decline of the American system of education. Most institutions of higher education have become expensive and extremely political. Professors seem too often to be preoccupied with doctrine rather than teaching skills meant to prepare students for professions. As a result, students and their families too often incur high debt and pay outrageous amounts of money for credits and certificates that could be achieved with less money and time involvement.

When I attended college and graduate school, what John McWhorter refers to as “the ordinary trajectory” after high school served for me more as a trajectory of escape from poverty. I came from a family that had little education, and college and graduate degrees freed me from poverty and afforded a very rewarding life. The path I took seems less rewarding today.

Franklin T. Burroughs
Walnut Creek, Calif.

To the Editor:

John McWhorter is absolutely right: Not everyone needs to go to college, but everyone does have to become educated and prepared to be a responsible citizen. Can that be done without going to college?

Dr. McWhorter suggests, together with Leon Botstein, that an appropriate basic education could be achieved by the end of 10th grade. Possibly. But — been there, done that. Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, was of that opinion back in the 1940s, and indeed the University of Chicago Laboratory School discharged me with my high school diploma at the end of 10th grade in 1947.

Well, probably I was ready for college intellectually, possibly emotionally, but certainly not physically. I took two more years at preparatory school before I went to college, during which time I grew about four inches and without which I would never have succeeded in becoming a three-time all-American in soccer.

OK, so that is not a measure of success in life. But to implement a shorter curriculum as a useful part of a comprehensive restructuring of our educational system there would have to be more universal acceptance of the idea and a common appreciation of the goals of education. Mr. Hutchins’s idea was ahead of its time and did not last; the University of Chicago’s High School is now back to a traditional 12-grade curriculum.

Robert H. Palmer
New York

To the Editor:

John McWhorter, arguing against higher education, says that many young people might be “better off just getting out there and doing what they wanted to do, without four years of expensive preparation only diagonally related to what they were going to spend their lives doing.”

Well, let’s see. In college what I wanted to do was to be an actress. I ended up, diagonally, spending my life writing and teaching writing. Meanwhile, I had all kinds of college experiences “only diagonally” connected to preparing me for this life. I learned to speak pretty good French and minimal Spanish. I discovered Gawain and heroic couplets. I learned that I loved botany and anthropology. My mind exploded with existentialism and dramatic irony.

Meanwhile, I had my first beer and my first heartbreak, experienced a deep friendship and a resistance to certain concepts of my childhood, and interrogated my relationship to God.

Gee whiz, if only I’d had the benefit of Dr. McWhorter’s wisdom I wouldn’t have wasted my time on a “liberal education.”

Janet Burroway
Chicago