INTERVIEW: Rohingya refugees. Psychiatrist on treating victims of violence (ENG)

Dr Elisabeth Hoffmann discusses the need for mental health services in the camps and the difficulties for women to talk of the psychological trauma they've endured.

MSF236925

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INTERVIEW: Rohingya Refugees. Psychiatrist on treating victims of violence

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Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF236925

Date taken / Date Recorded 23/05/2018 12:00 AM

Country Bangladesh

Commissioning section MSF-FRANCE

Photographer / videographer / producer Patrick Shepherd

Usage Rights (MSF) MSF Publications, Social Media

Formal Consent Copy available no

Editor's rating ★★★★★ (C)

Video format h264 (Main) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 2m43s

Maximum Size 1920px × 1080px 272.61 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist INTERVIEW. KUTUPALONG-BALUKHALI CAMP/BANGLADESH

Elisabeth Hoffmann, psychiatrist, MSF
The first thing a Rohingya woman answers
when I ask about events in Myanmar is “we were robbed.”
She’ll say that her animals, her home and her land were stolen from her,
That her nationality was taken away from her.
But not a word about rape.

SLATE: MSF provides medical care and mental health services to victims of violence in the Rohingya refugee camps

Elisabeth Hoffmann
The women I see
are usually referred by doctors we work with at the health centres.
They keep going back to the doctor about various pains all over their bodies
desperate for a treatment that will work.
There’s often no underlying physical cause.
Once the doctors have prescribed vitamins and painkillers, they run out of options
and refer the patients to me.
My job is to make those women understand
that the many pains that cause them so much suffering
are in fact because of the psychological trauma they’ve endured.
It’s really hard to get them to talk.
That’s the aim of the psychotherapy and psychological support
MSF provides with its mental health services.
It gets them to talk about their psychological trauma.
They find it very difficult.
They’re more likely to allude to or describe the violence they witnessed,
like the woman who recently told me she’d assisted at the most horrific scenes,
men being hacked to pieces,
women raped by multiple soldiers
and children thrown onto fires.
During the consultation, which lasted an hour,
I asked her who was with her in the camp
and that’s how I found out
that the men she was talking about were in fact her husband and her brother,
that the women were her and her sister,
and the children her own two children.
We can suppose that, given the number of rapes,
some will have led in pregnancies.
But again,
it’s hard enough for these women to talk about it to a psychiatrist,
let alone to their husbands and families.
This means keeping their secret to themselves,
even more secret than anything else we ask them to talk about.
It’s a way to protect herself… and to protect her child.

SLATE: MSF treated 377 victims of sexual and domestic violence between the end of August 2017 and April 2018. The real number of victims is certainly much higher.