As Ukraine war drags on, civilians' mental health needs rise
Huddled in the back of a café near the train station where a missile killed dozens of people nearly a year ago, Nastya takes slow, deliberate breaths to calm herself
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine (AP) — Huddled in the back of a café near the train station where a missile killed dozens of people a year ago, Nastya took slow, deliberate breaths to calm herself. Overnight, her neighborhood had been bombed again, and she just couldn’t take any more.
Heeding her parents’ advice, the 20-year-old woman had visited the nearby psychiatric hospital that morning — a place that also bore the scars of war after being repeatedly bombed, including by a missile that destroyed part of the building last September. But the staff swept up the shattered glass, shoveled away the debris and carried on working, determined to stay in Kramatorsk, in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, to help those in need.
For Nastya, it was a lifeline.
"After today’s shelling, I could no longer cope with anxiety, the feeling of constant danger,” the speech therapy student said, giving only her first name to talk last month about the difficult decision to seek mental health care. The stigma of Soviet-era psychiatry, when dissidents were incarcerated in psychiatric institutions as a form of punishment, still lingers.
