There are now 165 children in the Belotserkovsky orphanage for boys. Here they study, do whatever they can, play sports, dance, sing, and do beautiful things. Many have relatives, but still most are doomed to be under the care of the state until the end of their days.
Vitya, 17, suffers from a strange illness. Viktor's sister, with whom the journalists talked, really wants to find specialists who would free his brother from obsession.
Victor, together with his sisters, became an orphan early - his mother died.
“We were brought up in the Tarashchansky orphanage,” says Irina (names have been changed). “It was good for us there, we were taught and loved. And then, when I already entered the technical school, Vitya and my sister were taken into a foster family. They were very religious people - Baptists. They were strict with children, but did not seem to offend them. True, they did not want to let Vitya visit me, although he asked. Maybe because we were of different faiths.
Until adolescence, as Irina says, Vitya was an ordinary boy (if we do not take into account the diagnosis of “moderate mental retardation” - Ed.).
- It happened when my brother was 14 or 15 years old. Then I learned from his adoptive mother that at night she saw: Vitya was dreaming of something unusual. But she didn't fit. Didn't wake me up. And in the morning my brother woke up as a completely different person. He began to say that he needed to go to the forest, that they were waiting for him there, he even grabbed a knife, began waving it, but, thank God, he did not injure anyone. When he has seizures, he gnaws at various objects, but does not bite people.
The first attack happened to him after that dream. It was a full moon
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After returning from the hospital where his adoptive parents had placed him, Victor no longer wanted to live with that family, says Irina. And he was not held back. The boy returned to the orphanage, visited his sister, who had already been married by that time. But more and more often he began to talk about the fact that he was drawn to the forest, about the brothers he had never had.
“His brothers are wolves,” Irina sighs. “He considers me and my sister to be wolves. For him, wolves are those who are good, close.
Children think he scares them
The director of the orphanage in Tarashcha, Nadezhda Vasina, witnessed how Viktor dropped to all fours, grinned, growled and tried to run …
“When the ambulance doctors stopped the attack, he didn't remember anything about what was happening to him,” she recalls. - In ordinary life, this is just a golden child, kind, always striving to help first. No anger and no aggression.
These incomprehensible attacks used to happen once every six months, and after the New Year they began to recur every month - on the full moon. Several times the young man was in the hospital, but the doctors did not name the true reason for his obsessions.
Viktor was transferred to the Belotserkovsky boarding school, where the medical staff is on duty around the clock. The teacher Nina Medvid says that Victor differs from many boarding school pupils, his peers, in development - he writes well, reads simple books. He draws in a childishly primitive way, but the colors and plots are light, there are no dark tones.
“I have been working for 44 years with children diagnosed with mental retardation, but this is the first time I have met such a case,” the teacher says. - True, I did not see the attack itself, it happened when I had already left work. But the children said that Vitya really began to look like a wolf cub, however, this did not last long. The children decided that he just scared them so. When the boy came to our boarding school, he asked for a book about animals. Opened on the page, where photos of wolves, and shows. I said that I like the bunny better - he is kind, does not offend anyone. And the next day he showed me the cubs again. His favorite book is about Mowgli, he knows all the characters there.
Irina visits her brother and is very worried about him. She says that now Victor has already learned to feel when he is feeling unwell, and can warn about it. But he still does not remember what happens next. Now the boy is again in the hospital for an in-depth examination.
COMMENTS OF SPECIALISTS
"The starting point could be a book about Mowgli"
- Such cases were described in the past and the century before last, in particular by the famous psychiatrist Kraft-Ebing. But they have not been deeply studied, not analyzed, - says the chief psychiatrist of the Kiev region Gennady Zilberblat. - In this story, the starting point could be a book about Mowgli - the boy may have wanted to get used to the image of a child living among wolves. Impressions could fall on fertile soil - an unstable psyche. In any case, it needs to be corrected and treated.
Interest in animals could be reflected in the psyche
“Such seizures can manifest themselves in the framework of epilepsy,” says Tamara Sumtsova, chief child psychiatrist of the Kiev region. - It cannot be ruled out that interest in animals, in particular in wolves, is reflected in the boy's psyche. If the child is carefully examined, you can probably find the reasons that give rise to such attacks.
REFERENCE
Lycanthropy (the name comes from two ancient Greek words "wolf" and "man") is a mythical disease when a person turns into a beast. According to legend, a werewolf grows over with wool, sharp claws and fangs appear. This is definitely a fantasy, as well as the fact that the disease can be transmitted through a bite. Lycanthropes - they are werewolves, werewolves - exist in the mythology of almost all peoples of Europe.
But along with magical lycanthropy, there is clinical. In 1963, Dr. Lee Illis of Hampshire presented a paper to the British Royal Society of Medicine entitled "On Porphyria and the Etymology of Werewolves." In it, he cited about 80 cases of similar diseases that were studied by certified doctors. Of course, in this case, a person does not turn into a wolf, but becomes a creature that is very far from a person in his physical and mental understanding. But Illis could not explain the phenomenon of how a werewolf regains human form, and within hours. In the international classification of the disease "lycanthropy" is not.