All told, there are at least seventy border walls in the world today. Their construction has inspired an entire field of research dedicated to studying their effects. Psychologists, economists, geographers, and other specialists regularly publish reports in outlets such as the Journal of Borderland Studies, and much of their research suggests that border walls may be affecting the people who live near them in unforeseen ways. — The New Yorker
As the discussions about producing and enforcing geopolitical borders become more commonplace in global news, the studies of the psychological effects of those of previous eras have become painfully relevant.
Dietfried Müller, a German psychiatrist, had noticed increased cases of paranoia and delusion in those who lived near the Berlin Wall; so many cases, in fact, that he came up with a term for a syndrome in his 1973 book: Mauerkrankheit, or wall disease.
According to Jessica Wapner of the New Yorker, the construction of border walls "has inspired an entire field of research dedicated to studying their effects. Psychologists, economists, geographers, and other specialists regularly publish reports in outlets such as the Journal of Borderland Studies, and much of their research suggests that border walls may be affecting the people who live near them in unforeseen ways."
How much talks of a US/Mexico border wall, among the others discussed around the globe, have an unintended psychological effect on those living near it?
4 Comments
I lived in West-Berlin back when the wall was still there and it also created a prison mentality.
We were teens but in a way we knew that Berlin was an island, a zoo, a prison. We could not word it but we didn't have "out of town" trips because there was no out of town.
Crossing the border - even though we were allowed to do it - was such a big deal that we rarely did it. Even decades later I still had to learn how to spend the weekend outside of city limits. I basically learned it once I moved out of Berlin completely for a few years later in life.
Comparable or not? I live in Detroit, one mile from Canada, separated by a river, connected by one tunnel and one bridge, and have never once set foot in it since moving here in 2006. I definitely don't feel any psychological effects from being separated from Canada. Is it separation itself, a wall, being "forbidden," or a constructed ideological narrative that causes any perceived psychological effects of borders?
A wall around the White House?
Build the wall in the median of the beltway and capture all of D.C.
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