Latest war adds new generation of mental trauma in Iraq

CHAMISHKO CAMP, Iraq (AP) - The group of women, members of Iraq's Yazidi religious minority, first did deep breathing as a relaxation technique. Then, as their children played in the center of the room, they talked about the traumas they had lived through when Islamic State extremists rampaged through their town.

Muna Murad spoke of the sorrow that overwhelms her when she's reminded of her brother-in-law, who was killed by the militants before her eyes. "Whenever I see his two kids playing with mine, I have trouble breathing," she said.

With such group counselling sessions, international aid groups are trying to help at least some of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who fled from their homes to escape the Islamic State and now live crammed into multiple camps like Chamishko around the north. But the efforts are a drop in the ocean in a county where an overwhelming number of people are dealing with mental trauma and where there are almost no facilities to help them.

The IS rampage across northern and western Iraq the past 18 months only adds a new generation of traumatized Iraqis after decades of war and conflict. From the long Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, to the 1991 Gulf War, through the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and the sectarian slaughter that followed, Iraqis have witnessed untold horrors and suffered the agonies of displacement.

Dr. Emad Abdul-Razzaq, the adviser on mental health issues to the Health Ministry, estimates 40 to 50 percent of Iraq's 33 million people have been affected by the trauma of the last few decades, in some cases causing serious personality changes like increased anger, anxiety and aggressiveness.

This in a country where there are only 130 licensed psychiatrists. There are just 2,000 beds in mental hospitals nationwide - 80 in the northern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, the rest in the capital Baghdad. A mental health hospital planned in the southern city of Diwaniya will be the country's first new facility in 60 years.

Helped by organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Iraq has struggled to provide more mental health services, setting up centers in hospitals and training regular doctors to provide some counseling. However, the effort is hamstrung by lack of funding. "We have accumulated problems, and the policymakers in the past have not made mental health support a priority," said Abdul-Razzaq.

At Baghdad's Ibn Rushd hospital mental health center, which sees approximately 150 patients a day, Dr. Mohammed Koreishi said the staff has tried to increase awareness in the public about the benefits of professional mental health care and overcome the strong social stigma against it. But he said there's a profound lack of trained professionals, including clinical psychologists and counselors.

"We have a problem in Iraq that doctors don't like to specialize in psychiatry because it has the poorest economic status - not like a surgeon," he said. At his center, patients are mainly treated with medication such as mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics and antidepressants, with limited recourse to counseling.

The vast majority of Iraqis are left to deal with their traumas on their own, and the causes of trauma can be varied and unexpected.

At Baharka, another camp for the displaced, Muntaha Salih Khalaf described how her life started to fall apart. In 2006, an American soldier patrolling in her Sunni neighborhood of the northern city of Mosul started asking her neighbors about her, referring to her as "the beautiful girl." He even visited her home once when her husband wasn't there, an unforgiveable breach of conduct in her deeply conservative community that sparked rumors she was having an affair.

Her neighbors started calling her a prostitute and her husband's family began sending threatening text messages. When her latest pregnancy began to show there was even talk that the soldier was the father, she said. Her husband, Mohammed Abdullah, decided to move the family to Damascus. But the stress of having her whole neighborhood turn against her had driven Khalaf into depression, severe mood swings and increasingly erratic behavior.

Then one day in Damascus, feeling she had to get rid of everything and start anew, she set the house on fire.

"My whole family has become like a sick body infected by me because of my mental issues," said Khalaf, a 40-year-old mother of eight. Her husband finally got the family to the Baharka camp, where she is now receiving group therapy and individual treatment for bipolar disorder.

"This has saved me as a mother and as a wife," she said. "I am meeting with people here who are supporting me and giving me advice on how to confront life."