Informational Warfare and Civilian Mental Health: How Cyber Conflict and Propaganda Reshape Public Consciousness and Daily Life

Abstract

Background: The twenty-first century has witnessed the maturation of information warfare from a peripheral instrument of statecraft into a persistent, low-cost, and highly scalable mode of conflict that operates continuously across the civilian information environment. Unlike kinetic warfare, informational warfare — encompassing propaganda, disinformation, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, and synthetic media such as deepfakes — does not require physical proximity to inflict harm; it instead colonises attention, distorts perception, and erodes the cognitive and emotional stability of entire populations [1-5]. Objective: This paper synthesises multidisciplinary evidence from psychiatry, communication science, cybersecurity, and international relations to examine how cyber conflict and propaganda reshape civilian mental health and daily functioning. Methods: A narrative review of 51 peer-reviewed articles, institutional reports, and empirical datasets published predominantly between 2019 and 2026 was conducted, covering disinformation and psychiatric disinformation, cyberattack-induced psychological distress, doomscrolling, deepfake-related trust erosion, and real-world conflict case studies from Ukraine and the Middle East. Results: Findings converge on a consistent pattern: sustained exposure to war-related and manipulated information is associated with clinically meaningful elevations in anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress symptomatology, and social distrust, with effect sizes that in some conflict-affected samples exceed 30-80 percent prevalence of clinically relevant distress [17,23,50]. Doomscrolling, algorithmic amplification, and the erosion of a shared factual reality independently compound these effects, while psychological inoculation and prebunking interventions show partial but inconsistent protective value [37-44]. Conclusion: Informational warfare should be recognised as a public mental health issue and a matter of national psychological resilience, not merely a communications or security problem. Multilevel interventions — combining media literacy, platform governance, clinical screening, and international norm-building — are required to protect civilian populations from its cumulative cognitive and emotional toll.