Country Without a Rear: The Ukrainian Experience of Continuous Traumatic Stress in the Context of Global Wars, Occupations, and Chronic Violence

This book introduces a new analytical construct, CCTSD – continuous collective traumatic stress disorder – as a language to describe the experience of societies that live for years under conditions of ongoing threat, war, poverty and moral injury, without a clear “after” to these events. Drawing on the Ukrainian experience of full‑scale war, the authors argue that classical PTSD and CPTSD frameworks do not fully capture situations in which trauma has not ended and “normality” itself becomes abnormal, and invite readers to look not only at symptoms, but at the living conditions that continually reproduce them. Grounded in recent Ukrainian research and global work on continuous traumatic stress (CTS), the book unpacks how ongoing stress manifests in different groups – military personnel, civilians, internally displaced people, volunteers and children – and how, if it is not recognized and supported in time, it gradually “solidifies” into PTSD and CPTSD. The Ukrainian case is placed alongside South Africa, Gaza, Syria, Yemen and refugee contexts, while also highlighting new dimensions of CTS that are summarized here as CCTSD: the scale of war, digital transparency, pervasive moral injury, and the attempt to build a national mental‑health system in the middle of active conflict. Combining the stories of realistic characters with empirical data and policy analysis, the book shows that responsibility for CCTSD lies not only with clinicians, but also with those who shape living conditions – from local communities to governments and international organizations. It closes with an invitation to readers, professionals and policymakers not to forget about the psyche when speaking of victory and reconstruction, and to use the language of CCTSD not as yet another label, but as a reason to change conditions of life so that the twenty‑first century might finally offer a real “after” to millions of people living in continuous trauma.