WEBCLIP: Mosul, Iraq. Joëlle Vernet on need for mental health care (INT)

MSF193218

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WEBCLIP: Mosul, Iraq. Joëlle Vernet on need for mental health care (ENG)

Subt. English

VIDEO. Mosul, Iraq: MSF treating emergencies in Qayyarah hospital

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Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF193218

Date taken / Date Recorded 14/04/2017 12:00 AM

Country Iraq

Commissioning section MSF-FRANCE

Photographer / videographer / producer Armelle Loiseau

Usage Rights (MSF) MSF Fundraising, MSF Publications, Social Media

Formal Consent Copy available no

Editor's rating ★★★ (F)

Video format h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 2m15s

Maximum Size 1920px × 1080px 231.25 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist I met children suffering huge distress and who had behavioural issues. It was even harder for the parents — in reality mostly mothers as the fathers were no longer with them — because they didn’t have the strength to cope with their children’s pain and emotions. There aren’t many ways children can express how they feel so we’re mainly talking about fairly routine behavioural disorders like bed-wetting. But there are other ones that can be far more serious. Some of the mothers felt they had no other choice than to tie their children up to keep them under control and stop them bothering their families and neighbours. These perfectly good mothers were totally out of their depth and really didn’t know how to manage. So our work was not just treating the child but child and mother together and sometimes even with brothers and sisters.
One story really struck me — a five-year old boy brought to us by a mother for a consultation. He spent all day hiding under a blanket because he was frightened and his mother wanted to take it away from him. She kept trying but he’d start screaming, he’d have behavioural problems and would get very agitated. After asking questions and listening attentively, we found out that he had been forced to watch his father being tortured and murdered, and his brothers and sisters being murdered too. The little boy hid behind his hands so as not to witness the horror but had been forced to take them away and look. Hiding under the blanket was his way of protecting himself. So our job was to explain to his mother what the blanket represented to her son and what she could do to help him — a mother who’d just lost her husband and all her other children. She and her son were the only ones to survive.

Keywords

Iraq