A biopsychosocial look on the violence in Colombia. Understanding violence to understand the role of psychiatrist in the post-peace agreement era

Abstract

Introduction

The armed Colombian conflict is one of the bloodiest and most extensive in the contemporary history of Latin America, with multiple factors and causes implicated.

Objectives

Determine the factors involved in the emergence of Colombian political violence from neurobiological, anthropological, social and psychoanalytic models.

Methods

We revised the report Basta Ya! of The National Center for Historical Memory, which approximates the casualties and victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. In addition, we conducted a rigorous review of current scientific and clinical literature on the neurobiology of violent behavior, social psychiatry and psychoanalytic papers about war, death, and survival instincts.

Results

Violent behavior can be explained by the neurobiological model of aggressive response as an imbalance between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. There is evidence to support a geographically-based violence in Colombia with a fragmentation of the territory, the State, and the Colombian identity. Moreover, we found the psychological component raised by Freud and in psychoanalysis, about war, and life and death instinct, as antagonistic manifestations of life-present in acts of violence.

Conclusions

The violence from the armed Colombian conflict has been one of the longest in modern history, determining its causality has been complex. However, understanding violence multifactorially allows us to improve social psychiatry and our role as clinicians in this new post-agreement era, in order to better establish mental health policies for victims and perpetrators in future reparation.

Disclosure of interest

The author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.