[News] the Palestinian psychologist challenging western definitions of trauma

[GL HERO SHIMA]

Even before the war in Gaza broke out, people in the besieged Palestinian territory had some of the world’s worst rates of mental illness.

Israel and Egypt’s blockade of the Mediterranean strip is now 17 years old; a generation has grown up knowing nothing but cyclical escalation, a dire lack of public services and next to no freedom of movement. Research published by Save the Children in 2022 found that four out of five children in Gaza said they live with depression, grief and fear, and three in five were self harming.

Since 7 October, the charity found that there has – unsurprisingly – been a dramatic deterioration in children’s mental health. “Children here have seen everything,” one father, Wasseem, told Save the Children researchers. “They’ve seen the bombs, the deaths, the bodies … We can’t pretend to them any more. Now, my son can even tell what types of explosives are falling.”

According to Dr Samah Jabr, chair of the Hamas-run Palestinian ministry of health’s mental health unit, experiencing such horrors does not easily translate into the clinical definition of, or treatment for, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Tools for evaluating depression, such as the Beck inventory, do not account for circumstances in which anguish is a reasonable response.

“If western society considers a car accident traumatic, can we use the same word for the level of atrocity happening in Gaza?” she said in an interview with the Observer. “The clinical description of PTSD captures the experience of, for example, a soldier who goes back home … Trauma in Palestine is collective and continuous. PTSD is when your mind is stuck in a traumatic loop. In Palestine, the loop is reality. The threat is still there. Hypervigilance, avoidance – these symptoms of PTSD are unhelpful to the soldier who went home, but for Palestinians, they can save your life. We see this more as ‘chronic’ traumatic stress disorder.”

Jabr, 47, grew up in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. Today, she is in charge of mental health provision across East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. A well-known public speaker and writer on mental health and human rights, she did her first medical degree and clinical rotations during the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, of the 2000s, which led to an interest in psychiatry and analytic psychotherapy.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/14/mental-health-palestine-children