Resignation Syndrome: towards a new understanding

The focus of this collaboration is Resignation Syndrome (RS): a progressive state of withdrawal that evolves into a condition of almost complete unresponsiveness, called ‘functional catatonia’. Interestingly, this syndrome seems to selectively affect migrant children and adolescents with a history of traumatic experiences. The syndrome typically has a very gradual onset, from depressive symptoms to progressive withdrawal, which results in loss of consciousness, lack of response to pain and malnutrition requiring tube feeding.

This project builds on a new ongoing collaboration between UCL and Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm. A key long-term goal of our inter-institutional team is to use dynamic causal modelling and other techniques of modern computational neuroscience, particularly within the so-called ‘active inference’ framework, to re-evaluate the condition of RS and provide a causal mechanistic explanation. In the future, this could help predict the development and treatment response in individual patients and groups.

This project has two distinct paths: firstly, to build a conceptual model of RS to account for all available epidemiological data, whilst in parallel using EEG and fMRI data from patients to re-analyse the results using dynamic causal modelling techniques.

Area

Neuroscience

UCL leads

• Dr Michael Moutoussis, Queen Square Institute of Neuroscience