The psychological consequences of the Chernobyl accident: findings from the International Atomic Energy Agency Study
The mental health findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency's study of villages around Chernobyl, reported by Ginzburg, the neuropsychiatric expert on one of its three international teams. Asked by the Soviet government in October 1989 to assess the health of people living in areas contaminated by fallout, the IAEA compared contaminated villages with similar nearby uncontaminated ones, matching the villagers sampled on age, sex and residence, and examined 1,356 people in 13 settlements. Its clinicians could identify no health disorders attributable directly to radiation in either group, but found levels of anxiety and stress that appeared out of proportion to the biological significance of the contamination. In the survey, almost half the adults in both kinds of village were unsure whether they had a radiation-related illness, and 71.8 per cent in the contaminated villages wanted to move.
Ginzburg's reading is that their concerns were rational. Radiophobia, the Soviet psychiatric term for an inappropriate fear of radioactive material, does not appear to him to be a clinically useful or relevant concept: the villagers did not understand how radiation causes illness, had not been told how contaminated their homes, farms and food were, and found official reports hard to believe, especially where they conflicted with others. Maps of the contaminated areas had not been officially published until March 1989. What they needed was education about their actual risks and about how much is known and unknown about the long-term effects of low-dose exposure. Read beside the Chernobyl article, which describes a culture of silence among the plant's operators, the paper shows information also withheld beyond the plant, by the state from the villagers. Its limits: stress was high in the control villages too, amid economic and political upheaval, so how much of it traced to the accident, to repeated medical study or to that upheaval was not yet fully resolved; and it is a short report on the IAEA's findings, not the full study.
Save this paper to a bibliography, keep notes on it, and export citations. Create a free account →