Living in Contaminated Sites: Which Cost for Psychic Health?

In this paper, we would like to offer a psychoanalytically oriented perspective on the psychic costs of most documented technological disasters (e.g. oil spill and nuclear accidents) or industrial pollution (e.g. asbestos manufacturing). We report a brief literature review about the relationship between Contaminated Sites (CSs) and mental health. The articles were selected from the most important medical and psychological databases: MEDLINE/Pubmed, PsycINFO and Proquest Psychology Journal. After electronic searches, we have manually reviewed reference lists from the identified publications. Literature review reveals that despite the specific kind of technological disasters (i.e. nuclear accidents, oil spill, asbestos manufacturing), the cost of survival is pretty much the same: anxiety, somatizations, rage, depression and post-traumatic conditions, which undermine one's own sense of psychic integrity. This cost seems to be even higher when people have to fight an invisible and boundless enemy, which threaten not only themselves but also their own children. Clinicians, mental health services and policy makers need to reflect upon these traumatic conditions in order to activate and promote a thinking process that can give rise to a new capability of containing all the experiential aspects that have remained alien, dissociated and unthinkable until that moment. Qualitative approaches and multi-dimensional analysis could lead a deeper understanding of the psychic dynamics and unconscious life in CSs.