The outbreak of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine almost two years ago has spread depression and a decline in people’s sense of well-being not only in the country that was attacked by Russia but also in the attacking country but throughout Europe and probably elsewhere around the world.
On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, thereby violating the country’s territorial sovereignty and escalating the Russo-Ukrainian war that began in 2014. Little is known about the psychological states surrounding the outbreak of war, particularly the mental well-being of individuals outside Ukraine.
A new study at Germany’s University of Münster just published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications under the title “Psychological well-being in Europe after the outbreak of war in Ukraine” said this mood decline was irrespective of age, gender, political views or any other attributes of the people questioned.
Waking up to smartphone notifications saying that the biggest country in the world had invaded a European country could have shocked people in similar ways, independent of their personalities or sociodemographic attributes. But in the weeks that followed, when the initial shock had subsided, the situation had a potentially less uniform effect on individuals, so that differences in threat sensitivity, tendency to contemplate, and other traits involving stability might have led to differences in participants’ propensities to experience a quick recovery in their well-being, they wrote.
After the immediate acute decline in global well-being levels on the day of the Russian invasion, recovery in well-being over the weeks following the outbreak of war was slow and connected with an individual’s personality, with individuals with low stability showing close to no recovery effects.
Is the war between Russia and Ukraine solely responsible for the mental health decline?
The invasion has had severe global consequences; for example, the war has resulted in Europe’s fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II, global food shortages, and negative effects on the world economy. The UN Global Crisis Response Group estimated that 1.6 billion people in 94 countries are exposed to at least one dimension of the crisis. While effects such as the displacement of millions of civilians or disrupted supply chains are immediately visible, the psychological implications of the outbreak of war may be more difficult to trace, with potentially even more people worldwide experiencing psychological distress and impaired mental health during the war.
However, individual personality traits play a decisive role as regards the issue of recovering from the shock, said an international team of researchers headed by the German university’s psychologists Julian Scharbert and Prof. Mitja Back. The study was based on around 45,000 individual surveys taking in 1,300 people from 17 European countries, with over 50 researchers involved.
