Honest question - let's say at some point in the future North Korea sees their current regime fall and a more democratic or at least benevolent dictatorship takes over. What sort of mass psychological issues are we looking at here? I can only imagine how the minds of the current citizenship work, would it be nearly impossible for those raised only knowing what they know to recover from the previous trauma?
The only state that I can think of that is remotely comparable to North Korea is pre-1992 Albania [1] - isolated and repressive, with a kind of leader-worship cult going on. After that all fell apart in the mid-nineties things didn't work out too well economically and socially, though I'm not sure that was due to mass psychological problems in the population. Survivors of cults such as Scientology that encourage isol…
One example comes to mind is post-defeat Germany in 1945. This is particularly interesting because here we have the total, absolute and undebatable annihilation of an entire worldview. North Korea will very likely also experience this "everything you ever believed is wrong" moment, so some parallels might apply. The Germans mostly kept their heads down and tried to ingore the past for a few decades. This might not be possible for the North Koreans, however, as they are not surrounded by rubble but by prosperity.
Another example would be the core-to-periphery of the Soviet Union when that collapsed. Around here there are many former inhabitants of the SU and they tell stories of chaos and desorientation with many people using their newly-recieved freedom to cheat others or be cheated. I think the Albanians experienced something similar with a snowball-scam of national proportions. It would be unfortunate if the economic reality of "the little man" in democratic post-North Korea were similar to this, since these things usually trigger a backlash.