Spartak Subbota is a name that still triggers either a flinch or a smile. Just a few years ago, he was the nation's leading "evangelist" of mental health, until a loud scandal involving his diplomas and titles knocked him off his therapeutic Olympus. Nevertheless, Spartak Subbota hasn't vanished—he continues to address his audience and analyze the human psyche, a field in which he constantly sharpens his expertise.
In this extensive interview with UA.News, we asked Spartak about how Ukrainians are surviving under conditions of total wartime stress: from the phenomenon of anxious individuals who can only fall asleep to the sound of explosions, to the massive boom in tarot card readers and regression therapists. And, of course, we didn't bypass the topic of his own daily life after the big scandal: how Subbota responds to hate today and why he believes that the "bitter aftertaste" remains with society, not with him.
Preserving Resources and Adapting to Life
Let’s start with the fact that our nervous system deeply loves constancy. Under conditions of increased load, the psyche operates more effectively when your daily schedule is highly predictable. Of course, current circumstances are extremely specific: we all understand that maintaining a regular rhythm of life is far from always possible. Especially when you factor in nighttime shelling, chronic pressure at work, domestic obligations to loved ones, and the fact that some are trying to study at the same time. However, despite all these objective difficulties, maintaining a daily routine remains the most critical factor for survival.
For an exhausted nervous system, this is no easy task, but in modern psychotherapy, there is an entire branch that specializes precisely in normalizing routines and building sustainable behavioral habits. This is called stimulus control therapy. It allows a person to build a healthy, strong connection between specific events, their physical location, and their current mental state. When a person can predict their next steps and plan actions in advance, their level of anxiety drops significantly.
By its very nature, anxiety is an objectless fear. We frequently explain this difference to patients using simple examples: fear is always an objectified anxiety. If you see an aggressive dog rushing toward you, you experience fear because the source of the threat is clear and defined. Anxiety, on the other hand, feeds on uncertainty and the anticipation of abstract negative events in the future. Take, for instance, a situation where a person hears the sound of a "Shahed" drone. What is that—fear or anxiety? Even though the sound is entirely real, it is still anxiety. After all, you can never know for certain whether it will fly past or strike the exact spot where you are standing.
This state of constant anticipation of danger mobilizes the nervous system. A person becomes hyper-focused, and this continuous muscular and mental tension begins to critically exhaust them after a while. Our psyche is quite well-adapted to short-term loads; in stressful situations, we can display colossal efficiency. But one must always consider the limits of endurance. A human being is a living creature; they cannot permanently exist at the peak of mobilization. Rest is vital.
But how can one fully rest when shelling and air raid sirens last for hours, exhausting you in the middle of the night, and in the morning you have to get up, go to work, care for children, cook food, all while having absolutely no idea what the next day will bring? In such conditions, resources burn out instantly. You can call it by different terms—burnout or the exhaustion of adaptive potential—but the core remains the same: a person’s schedule collapses, and the sense of a predictable tomorrow vanishes.
That is precisely why the baseline recommendation for restoring quality of life under chronic stress is the creation of an artificial routine. You absolutely must have a schedule that you stick to despite any external circumstances. Since our brain tends to associate a specific place with a certain activity, and that activity with the place, this instrument must be used to adjust your state. The routine must be rigidly anchored to locations and these rituals repeated daily.
I understand that in wartime conditions, advising someone to plan their day might sound absurd or even ironic to many. However, a massive volume of clinical research compares the functioning of the nervous system under pressure in people who maintained at least an artificial routine versus those who let everything drift. One of the brightest examples of this approach—long before the term "stimulus control therapy" emerged—was the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived a Nazi concentration camp. He created logotherapy—therapy through meaning. His primary conclusion was that as long as a person has a reason to live, as long as they independently structure their time and plan even minor steps, their nervous system finds the resources to mobilize.
Right now, many Ukrainians feel like giving up: a dangerous sense of hopelessness emerges, a reluctance to do anything because "it’s unknown what will happen tomorrow." The absence of long-term plans is one of the greatest psychological risks today. Therefore, despite everything, force yourself to stick to a routine. Even if the future seems foggy, your calendar must contain a clear list of a few basic tasks every day. They should be tied to specific places and cover different aspects of your daily life—from chores to work. Only in this way can you preserve the integrity of your psyche.
Proactivity as a Countermeasure to Anxiety and the Basic Need for Control
The point is that when our nervous system mobilizes, it seeks and expects quite concrete actions from us. In other words, active engagement is required to allow us to subjectively guarantee safety. Even if this activity isn't directly aimed at ensuring your personal safety, it can be oriented toward the safety of others. This is called proactivity.
For example, if you face a high level of anxiety every time, even though nothing is objectively threatening you at that exact minute, you must use willpower to integrate mandatory tasks into your schedule. It can be anything: from intense physical exercise to the banal act of messaging loved ones to ask how they are doing. Establish a rigid routine for preparing meals, sorting out your wardrobe, or just systematically ironing clothes. Such small domestic cycles significantly shape a sense of environmental control within the psyche. And control, as is universally known, is the most crucial factor of safety in a person's life, since safety is one of our basic, fundamental needs.
Windowless Cafés, Vital Psyche Needs, and the "Price of a Mistake"
We are indeed full of double standards, so I would like to draw attention to a few fundamental points. Let's start with human vital needs—meaning those basic needs without which we simply cannot physically exist. Chronic sleep disruption eventually and inevitably leads to hallucinatory syndrome, a critical drop in activity, deep depressive states, and ultimately, fatal outcomes. A person deprived of normal sleep for long enough will simply die—just as they would from prolonged starvation. Sleep is a fundamental vital need, and that is a medical fact.
On one hand, I completely agree: we should be proud that Ukrainians are not easily broken. We demonstrate a unique ability to adapt to any extreme conditions. Many wars happen in the world, but by no means are all nations capable of being so mentally mobilized while simultaneously finding positive mental anchors inside pure hardship. On the other hand, however, we must clearly differentiate professions.
There are types of work where higher cognitive functions—concentration, mental flexibility, focus—play an absolutely pivotal role. These include surgeons, first responders, power grid dispatchers, or specialists working with the military who are responsible for the accuracy of operational data transmission. If such a person is chronically sleep-deprived, the quality of their duties drops so low that it poses a direct threat to the lives of others. In this case, their missteps become iatrogenic. In medicine, the term "iatrogenesis" refers to a worsening of a patient's condition caused directly by the intervention or error of the medical specialist themselves. Simply put, it's a situation where things were relatively fine until the person went to the doctor, and after the visit, things got worse. That is why a golden rule applies in surgical practice: if a doctor was on duty all night and didn't sleep, a colleague steps in to replace them without question, even if the original schedule dictated the first doctor should operate. Alternatively, a scheduled surgery is simply postponed if it isn't urgent. The main postulate here is to do no harm.
However, there are professions that objectively do not require ultra-high cognitive abilities or constant intellectual overexertion from an employee. Are employers' demands on such categories a manifestation of double standards, and does it look less humane under wartime conditions? Yes, absolutely. However, the price of a mistake in such spheres is incomparable; it is extremely low, while the social and individual benefit of continuing to work is significantly higher. Here, the price of a slip-up is, at most, a poorly brewed cup of coffee, an item rung up at the register a few hryvnias more expensive, or a minor error in routine calculations. Such risks are not a high enough price for a person to completely refuse to perform their duties when they need to provide for themselves, their family, and support the economy.
And the benefits—meaning the psychological and social bonuses of such work—completely outweigh the possible negative consequences. I have a friend who owns a café. When a missile strike landed nearby and blew out the establishment's windows, the entire courtyard of that building had the opportunity to drink hot coffee in the morning. This means that the overall quality of life for the people around significantly improved at that specific moment. Yes, the barista was exhausted and sleep-deprived, it was incredibly difficult for him, technical errors occurred, and there was even a cash discrepancy at the end of the day—no question about it. But our strength lies precisely in the fact that we are capable of not just functioning under increased stress, but also supporting one another.
This mutual support is by no means always verbal; it often bears a purely mental character. People who, despite everything, make the decision to show up at their workplaces are doing a great service to society. When we come to our favorite café or the place where we are used to reading books and see a familiar face working there, it instantly restores a sense of stability. As I have already noted, this is a key element of the artificial control over our micro-space, and we utilize this psychological tool with great pleasure.
Therefore, my verdict is this: if the price of a professional mistake is critically high, I strongly recommend taking a day off and restoring vital resources. And in most cases, reasonable employers provide this opportunity when high personal responsibility is involved. But if the price of a mistake is minimal, we cannot demand special, warm-house conditions for ourselves. If someone in Kyiv or Kharkiv isn't sleeping due to night shelling, absolutely the entire city isn't sleeping. These are our shared wartime realities, and things are difficult for everyone right now without exception.
The Phenomenon of "Calming via Explosions" and Relief Post-Panic Attacks
The most common category here consists of people with chronically elevated levels of anxiety. They are objectively more anxious than the majority. The thing is, their nervous system mobilizes precisely when a threat is merely expected. The psyche remains in a state of continuous focus, ready to react to a serious challenge at any second. And as long as this real danger is absent, the person remains in a state of exhausting hyper-mobilization.
Previously, in classical psychiatry, this fell under the list of characterological traits and was called the "anxious-apprehensive type." Such individuals possess an inherent, elevated vigilance. And there is no pathology in this; for them, it is even an evolutionary advantage—some of the best crisis managers in the world come from this cohort. This is the type of person who, just by walking into a room, instantly notices that a tiny object is out of place. They are the first to register the slightest fluctuations in air temperature, read the micro-expressions of those around them, and lock onto a multitude of microscopic details. The cause of this phenomenon is purely genotypic; the person is simply born with this personality specificity. Their nervous system is naturally more sensitive to low-intensity stimuli, so it instantly registers any changes in the external environment and forces them to be on guard.
This analytical ability only develops and sharpens over time. However, there are both obvious pluses and serious minuses here. The paradox lies in the fact that such an anxious person only feels a strange relief when they encounter a real, material threat—for example, when explosions start booming loudly outside the window. At that moment, their nervous system seems to say, «Phew, finally, this is exactly what we’ve been waiting for all this time, now everything makes sense, we can lie down and rest.»
If we look at things soberly, these people lived much worse in a mental sense before the full-scale invasion than after it occurred. Because prior to February 24, there was endless informational buildup: will there be a war or won't there, will they attack or will it blow over? The entire time, they found themselves in a colossal psychological hypertonus. However, as soon as the situation became critical, they were the first to instantly mobilize their psychic resources. While others panicked, the anxious-apprehensive types were already giving clear orders: «Listen here, right now we are quickly gathering these items, documents go over there, we act according to this plan...» They instantly become very concrete, collected, and effective, resolving the crisis first and with maximum precision. This is a very specific psychic architecture. Conversely, those citizens who are permanently calm, phlegmatic, and balanced during peacetime often turn out to be significantly less proactive at the moment of real chaos. This is simply an inherent parameter of the nervous system, that's all.
What should people do if they notice such a reaction in themselves? First of all, accept it as a baseline biological fact. For some reason, society views this as a serious problem, though in reality, it is simply a specific trait of your character. By no means should it be "treated" or drowned out with handfuls of sedatives. Artificially suppressing such anxiety with medication is the same as chemically punishing a person for being too sensitive or crying during a dramatic movie. This is the specificity of your personality, and you don't need to change it, because you are the best managers in critical conditions.
Those readers who have a diagnosed panic disorder know this algorithm perfectly well: until the panic attack actually happens, the person suffers in terrible tension. But as soon as the attack occurs and passes its peak, total relaxation sets in. The person clearly understands that for the next 24 hours, they are guaranteed to be free from new attacks, and now they can finally live in peace. Direct confrontation with a real, objectified threat is much lighter and more understandable for our psyche than its prolonged, suspended anticipation. And here we return once again to the key criterion of psychological survival—the need for subjective control over the situation.
"Trendy" ADHD and Fake Diagnoses
Today, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder «(ADHD)» has turned into a trend. People en masse are diagnosing themselves after short quizzes or video clips on social media. However, ADHD is not just absent-mindedness or temporary fatigue; it is a real, congenital neurological impairment linked to the developmental features of the central nervous system. It manifests as early as childhood and is based on three criteria: attention deficit, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Acquiring it in adulthood due to poor upbringing is impossible.
The primary issue with the current fashion surrounding this diagnosis is total self-diagnosis. Anyone who finds it difficult to focus on an uninteresting subject or a boring job immediately attributes the syndrome to themselves. Furthermore, this diagnosis is universally stamped on children who perform poorly in school, even though the problem often lies merely in the fact that teachers do not know how to make their subject engaging.
Statistics from colleagues at a British specialized center that develops medical protocols (NICE) are striking: upon professional re-examination of patients who arrived with a pre-existing self-diagnosis of ADHD, the actual syndrome is confirmed in fewer than 7% of cases.
The rest is the result of incorrect diagnosis or the fact that people succumbed to the "self-reference effect." They rely on their own subjective perception of themselves, try on other people's symptoms, and mistakenly diagnose themselves with ADHD, depression, or obsessive-compulsive disorder simply because they are going through a difficult period in life.
For many, ADHD has become a convenient excuse behind which they hide ordinary laziness, poor upbringing, or other character issues. And this hits the people who actually have the syndrome. When a diagnosis becomes a meme, real disorders are devalued by society. Meanwhile, individuals with true ADHD suffer severely because their social functioning and work quality are profoundly impaired.
Real ADHD requires serious treatment, often pharmacological, including psychostymulants of the amphetamine class. These are serious medications, not harmless paracetamol. And a simple marker applies here: if a person believes they have this syndrome but is not ready for serious therapy, they highly likely do not have it. People with the real disorder are ready for anything just to improve their quality of life.
Of course, ADHD has certain advantages—sometimes such people perform specific, precise tasks significantly better and faster. However, there are far more drawbacks and challenges here. It is time for society to stop treating this condition as a joke or a manifestation of laziness; instead, we must minimize stigmatization and treat real patients with seriousness and support.
The Action Algorithm During Mental Blackmail
Despite the fact that in specific moments, people with ADHD can indeed perform certain tasks even better than others, and this condition is not an outright negative, it still carries far more drawbacks. It fundamentally destroys quality of life. Therefore, laughing at it or dismissively tossing out phrases like «what kind of disorder is that, he's just lazy» when a person truly has this pathology is extremely cruel. Try proving to society afterward that it's all serious. Historically, that's exactly how it went in our society: first, they openly mocked the old man, and then they found him hanged in the barn. Therefore, such markers should be treated with maximum seriousness.
Whenever you deny someone primary psychological assistance, you must soberly calculate the worst potential consequences. You need to realize how fatal the results can be if you choose to simply ignore a person's complaint. Very often, the finale is not just a permanently low quality of life, but a total refusal by the individual to continue their biological existence.
Naturally, in daily life and partner relationships, we regularly encounter the other side of the coin—when one of the partners, at the moment of a breakup or a crisis, begins to explicitly threaten suicide and blackmail with phrases like: «I'll do something to myself,» «I'll hang myself,» or «I'll kill myself.» How should one act in such destructive situations?
First, you must never treat such statements lightly or irresponsibly. In clinical practice, it frequently happens that even if patients initially use these threats as a tool for psychological pressure, they subsequently end up committing actual suicide. If a person openly and articulately speaks about an intention to commit suicide, it is a direct medical indication for their immediate hospitalization. This is an ironclad reason to promptly turn to specialized services for help. Everyone who needs to know about it—from the duty workers at the nearest psychoneurological dispensaries to the police—must be immediately notified and warned that this specific individual is capable of suicide. From the standpoint of personal safety, this is the primary step that must be taken. Because if the person declared it and you subsequently ignored the episode, a fully logical question will arise in the legal field: why didn't you contact profile specialists if you were openly warned of danger?
Second, even if the partner uses such blackmail purely as a model for emotional manipulation, we still act according to a single algorithm: we call emergency services and register this call officially. If the person was simply trying to play on your feelings, such a sharp and official reaction will instantly force them to cardinally alter their behavior. Such incidents are strictly logged by state authorities, and next time, the blackmailer simply won't want to play such dangerous manipulative games with law enforcement and medics.
The Ethics of Support in Grief
The most critical thing in such a situation is to clearly understand what should categorically not be said. Everything here depends on a vast number of factors, but the most common mistake made by onlookers is the attempt to "normalize" a person's suffering. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this approach is interpreted by the grieving person as direct devaluation. Cliché phrases like: «Well, everyone is losing someone right now,» «many are going through this today,» or «times are tough, it's hard on everyone» are perceived exclusively as disregard for their personal, unique tragedy. This is the first fundamental point.
The second warning: under no circumstances should you assure the person that «everything will work out.» At the moment when the survivor is in the acute phase of processing grief, their subjective perception of their own state is absolutely catastrophic. Any attempts to comfort or soothe them with an abstract future feel entirely alien, fake, and unrealistic to the psyche.
It is also categorically forbidden to demand that the person constantly remember, detail, or recount the tragic events. For the deep and safe processing of such crisis states in modern practice, specific therapeutic directions exist, particularly EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—Editor's Note). Attempts to get through such deep grief without qualified professional help are accompanied by a rapid and severe decline in the quality of life. To a significant extent, this leads to so-called emotional invalidation. Meaning, the person loses the capacity to normally integrate into society, their customary social ties dissolve, work productivity drops critically, and all basic life functions are blocked as a whole.
This is an exceptionally serious problem that is simply impossible to handle independently. Moreover, during such an acute period, attempting to artificially or forcibly shift the person's focus of attention onto some other, "positive" things is completely ineffective. Such attempts to distract do not help in any way to normalize the mental state and quality of life of the sufferer.
The Phenomenon of the Esoteric Boom and "Requests to the Universe"
This is actually a profound question, and cognitive science—the science of thinking and cognitive processes—describes such phenomena very clearly and in great detail. The main catalyst here is a sharp loss of a person's sense of control over their own life. When society faces a pandemic, a full-scale war, harsh economic hardships, destructive natural disasters, or political turbulence, the psyche vitally needs compensation for this loss. In Ukraine right now, people have collided absolutely with this entire list simultaneously.
Our nervous system is evolutionarily very poor, almost critically poor, at tolerating a state of prolonged uncertainty. And such magical practices—from reading Tarot cards to the services of regression therapists—instantly create three basic illusions for an exhausted brain. The first and most important of them is the illusion of understanding the processes happening around. The person allegedly receives clear answers to those questions that are objectively impossible to answer in the real world. This restores a subjective sense of control over the future and significantly lowers the level of current anxiety. Furthermore, for our psyche on a physiological level, there is absolutely no difference whether this esoteric system of knowledge is real or entirely fabricated by fraudsters—the therapeutic effect of relief in the moment will be absolutely identical.
Our fundamental need for meaning operates directly here. The human brain is evolutionarily programmed to find patterns in everything without exception, because the ability to anticipate the rules of the game automatically reduces the level of worry. For example, a suffering person subconsciously reasons: «A war started in the country, but the card spread warned me about it in advance!» or «This event was an obvious sign from above!». Such mental constructs artificially form an illusion of control over chaos. And the stronger the external stress, the higher the probability that a person will blindly believe this magic actually works. They begin to see cause-and-effect relationships where they never existed, even if the information being sold to them for huge sums of money is pure falsehood.
An identical story occurs with the currently popular "requests to the Universe" and manifestations. If you evaluate this phenomenon personally for the specific individual who formulates such a request, there is a certain meaning here, but it bears a purely individual, psychological character as a form of self-soothing. However, if you look at things objectively and scientifically, there is absolutely no sense in this, since the Universe as a physical system could not care less about our desires.
Remember how on the third day of the full-scale invasion, millions of people synchronously visualized that Putin suddenly died? Well, there's your result. All these beautiful marketing stories about the "materiality of thoughts" and energy transmissions, to the great regret of esotericists, compromise-free shatter against the fundamental laws of theoretical physics.
Media Scandal 2023: Success Instead of Excuses
You see, when your audience grows so rapidly and on such a large scale, and you objectively happen to be a person who isn't overly compliant... I, by virtue of certain life mistakes or, on the contrary, deep wisdom (who knows?), am an uncompliant individual and rather radical in my public statements. And in society, a clear rule applies: if it is absolutely impossible to control you from the outside, they systematically try to knock you down.
But if we speak purely about the pluses—personally, my opinion regarding public pressure and regarding so-called enemies changed drastically after that. It was actually a rather useful episode in my life. And if such an episode did not exist evolutionarily, it would have been absolutely necessary to create it artificially. Second, this situation motivated me to study even more and develop cognitively. A person goes through a colossal school of life via such massive crises. Of course, as they say in the famous joke, "a bitter aftertaste remains" (smiles).
People in our country are generally chronically inclined to choose some single, simple, primitive truth because digging deep into details, especially in wartime, is too much of a cognitive load. Understand that if this case had happened during peacetime, far less public attention would have been paid to it, because then there are plenty of other topics in the information space. But since people critically need an illusion of control over the situation, they always need a high-profile person to be within reach with whom they can interact—whether good or bad, it no longer matters.
Oleksiy Arestovych performed a massive psychotherapeutic function for society in this sense. Those who passionately loved him, or just as passionately hated him—they all actually had direct contact with a personality. It didn't matter where exactly this contact occurred—in the comments on social media or exclusively inside their own heads—but it created a subjective illusion of control over the situation around them.
When a person facing misunderstanding goes through a public scandal, they perform an important function—they give society the opportunity to interpret the situation in whatever way is personally convenient for people. Therefore, I absolutely do not regret that everything happened the way it did. Even if I had the hypothetical opportunity to replay something backward, I'm not even sure I would replay it at all, because I am incredibly satisfied with the final result.
For example, it was precisely this scandal that powerfully motivated me to enroll at the University of South Wales for a degree in "Clinical Psychiatry," and I graduated with distinction, which is absolutely equivalent to our red diploma. Right now, I have officially joined the Chartered Institute in Britain. And I would have never in my life done all of this if it weren't for that media scandal. There are hidden advantages and disadvantages everywhere, this must be clearly understood.
Therefore, if someone still has to bear personal responsibility for current failures—their own and those of the entire society at a moment when they cannot be influenced objectively—then why, properly speaking, shouldn't it be me?
