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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

SO113

Memory under siege: a neuropsychiatric review of war-related confabulation

MEMORY UNDER SIEGE: A NEUROPSYCHIATRIC REVIEW OF WAR-INDUCED CONFABULATION

Source-monitoring deficits caused by chronic war stress disrupting connectivity between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex create a biological susceptibility to memory distortion that digital propaganda can exploit.

The review aims to examine the neuropsychiatric mechanisms of memory distortion under conditions of hybrid warfare, prioritizing clinical implications over tactical analysis, and to clinically distinguish spontaneous confabulation arising from organic trauma from provoked confabulation triggered by synthetic narratives. The methodology involved a systematic narrative synthesis following PRISMA guidelines; Scopus, PsycNet, and PubMed were searched, combining terms such as hippocampal–prefrontal circuitry, cortisol-induced neurotoxicity, and source-monitoring deficits using Boolean operators. According to the flow diagram, 919 records were identified through database searches; after removing 51 duplicates, 868 records were screened, 757 were excluded, and 111 reports were sought for full-text retrieval. Inclusion criteria were populations in active conflict zones and encoding under severe stress, while exclusion criteria were non-war-related trauma and organic lesions. The synthesis indicates a consistent association between conflict-related hypercortisolemia and structural vulnerability in the CA1 subregion of the hippocampus, with this functional disconnection impairing source monitoring and creating a biological susceptibility to memory distortion. The poster table summarizes three key findings: trauma and dissociation increase susceptibility to false memories (Sajjadi et al., 2021), hyperarousal constrains contextual encoding, producing overgeneral memories (Miano et al., 2022), and activation of negative schemas disrupts reality filtering and increases involuntary memories (Griffin and Fletcher, 2017). Whereas organic confabulation is rooted in fixed frontal lesions, provoked confabulation in destabilized regions functions as a response driven by susceptibility to suggestion from digital propaganda. The author emphasizes the difficulty of distinguishing deliberate lying, structural brain damage, and trauma-related memory distortion in individuals from conflict zones, noting that standard diagnostic frameworks do not adequately capture this intersection. In conclusion, a framework is proposed for clinicians and forensic psychiatrists to assess narrative reliability; the full-text review of 111 reports is noted to be ongoing, and future priority should be given to fMRI studies with high ecological validity that test source-monitoring deficits.

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