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Children of World War II Evacuees were Hospitalized for Mental Illnesses Passed Down from Traumatized Parents [newsweek.com]

 

During World War II 50,000 Finnish children were sent away from their parents to temporary foster care in Sweden. A new study builds the case that adverse events like this in childhood can have deep psychological consequences not only for those directly affected, but also for their descendants.

Past research has shown that many of the Finnish war children who were evacuated went on to have a much higher rate of psychiatric hospitalization than the children who stayed. The new study, by the same set of researchers, finds that once those children grew up and had children of their own, they may have passed down some of that trauma to the next generation. Specifically, daughters of female child evacuees showed a higher rate of psychiatric hospitalization than the children of those who were not evacuated.  

“It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that we’d have seen these results,” Stephen Gilman, an author on the new study published in JAMA Psychiatry told Newsweek.

[For more on this story by  JOSEPH FRANKEL, go to http://www.newsweek.com/interg...eedescendants-725232]

Photo: A stroller left on the tracks at a train station in Croatia
ANTONIO BRONIC/REUTERS

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