Iraq's Crisis of Scarred Psyches

[MountainLaurel]

What have we done?

:cry:

More than 25 years after Saddam Hussein's rise to power ushered in a period of virtually uninterrupted trauma -- three wars, crippling economic sanctions and now a violent insurgency -- the psychological damage to many Iraqis is only now being assessed, psychiatrists and government officials here say.

Even as a grim, though incomplete, picture of the population's mental health has emerged in recent studies, so too has the realization that the country's health care system is ill-equipped to deal with what are likely millions of potential psychiatric patients with conditions born of the hardship of recent years.

One recent study was sparked by one of the country's darkest days in recent memory. On Aug. 31, nearly 1,000 Shiite Muslim pilgrims died -- some trampled in a crush of humanity, others by drowning -- when a religious procession across a Baghdad bridge became a lethal stampede.

Months after the dead were buried and the wounded had begun to heal, a team of psychiatrists at the Health Ministry established a psychological outreach facility in Sadr City, a teeming Shiite slum in the capital, to assess and treat the damage inflicted on victims, witnesses and their families. What they found surpassed even their worst fears. More than 90 percent of the people surveyed suffered from psychological disorders, including depression, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

"The people we've identified as troubled are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the mental health situation in this country," said Ali Abdul Razak, 55, who runs the clinic in a dank corner of Sadr City's Imam Ali Hospital. "I don't consider this post-traumatic, I consider it 'continuous traumatic,' because the trauma they have is ongoing."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/05/AR2006030500948.html

[LynnTheDem]

1. Yeah but they're not Americans, so who cares.

:sarcasm:

Not most Americans, that's obvious. Hell, most Americans don't give a shit about the shredded, scarred, ripped apart Americans suffering from bush's bullshit, let alone the Iraqi people.

[MountainLaurel]

2. You're exactly correct on that second point

Otherwise, they would care that areas of the U.S. have infant mortality rates worse than countries like Bangladesh or that American children living in inner city neighborhoods are also suffering from PTSD that never ends. (They show the exact symptoms as battle-scarred veterans.)

[Lone_Star_Dem]

3. These are the same people that Americans are being told are grateful

...for our presence there.

We've turned their lives into living nightmares of a magnitude that most Americans couldn't begin to understand. However, unlike Americans who can, for the most part, go to a psychiatrist and get help and medicine, they don't have such an option.

From the article:

"Resources for treatment are scarce. Only about 75 psychiatrists remain in a country that has endured a brutal eight-year war with Iran and two with the United States, along with crippling economic sanctions in the 1990s and the bloody insurgency today. Many fled along with other professionals to escape kidnappings and threats from insurgents. As a result, there is one psychiatrist for about every 300,000 Iraqis, compared with about one for every 10,000 Americans. There are currently no child psychiatrists in the country of about 25 million, Razak said."

I wonder if a people who commits suicide bombings have higher rates of depression? It seems to me that it could be the case. If you're feeling hopeless and like there's no reason to go on living, why not offer yourself for such a task?

[OneBlueSky]

4. unfortunately, a lot of US service personnel are coming home . . .

with some pretty severe mental and emotional disorders . . . not to mention missing limbs and other serious physical injuries . . .