Traumatised world

In early January, as the world waited to see whether the United States’s addiction to carnage and destruction would lead to all-out war with Iran, US congresswoman Ilhan Omar remarked: “[E]very time I hear conversations around war, I find myself being stricken with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder].”

At the age of eight, Omar fled war-torn Somalia for Kenya, where she spent four years in a refugee camp. Her PTSD comment generated mockery and rage from the usual suspects in the US political establishment and commentariat; apparently, US soldiers deserve a monopoly on this particular disorder and refugees need not apply.

But in an age of unprecedented levels of forced human displacement – in which, according to the UN Refugee Agency, over half of the world’s refugees are children – the prevalence of psychological trauma among refugee youth should be an issue of utmost urgency for anyone concerned with, you know, the future.

Take, for example, the severely overcrowded Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, currently home to some 7,000 migrant children. In 2018, reports emerged of children as young as 10 attempting suicide; more recently, a psychologist in the camp warned that preschool-aged kids were banging their heads against walls and pulling out their hair, among other behaviours, while children as young as seven said they wanted to die.

Such camps serve as incubators for trauma – which for many children is cumulative and multifaceted, encompassing traumatising experiences in the home country, traumatising experiences during migration, and the trauma of being trapped in unsanitary and unsafe camps that offer no space for psychological recovery or hope. Obviously, having parents who are themselves traumatised can also have serious repercussions on a child’s mental health.

Caoimhe Butterly – an Irish trainee psychotherapist and director of the award-winning documentary ‘The Border’, who has spent six years visiting refugee camps in Greece, Calais and the Balkans – told me that children in the camps are increasingly “expressing distress, despair and hyper-vigilance or self-harm” as well as “withdrawal and shut-down”.

Children are the “casualties of policies of containment and the cruelty of indefinite limbo”, she said, and the “cognitive, emotional and physiological impacts of a system that is in itself re-traumatising are resulting in a profound crisis”.

The crisis is similarly on display in the Pacific island nation of Nauru, notorious for its service on behalf of Australia as an offshore migrant detention centre.

Excerpt from: ‘Child suicide is a symptom of our traumatised world’.

AlJazeera.com