Human Rights Violation and Chronic Symptoms of Ptsd

Vito Zepinic

Abstract


The protection of human rights is problematic and almost universally broken during war, especially against civilians. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Geneva Convention 1949 define the essential rules and principles that apply in times of war and seek to protect people who are not or are no longer taking part in the hostilities. The study reported in this article was conducted among 54 patients who had survived war in the Balkans, either as the prisoners-of-war or civilians, who had reported the various types of the human rights violation during the war that caused development of chronic PTSD.
The experience of war-trauma causes a form of one’s consciousness and experience of the self that is broken, limited, adualistically irrupted, and dysfunctional. Such chronic condition blocks the victims’ posttraumatic growth and leads the traumatised self into isolation from both the inner and the outer world.


Keywords


Human rights; POW; Chronic PTSD; Torture; Posttraumatic growth

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/%25x

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