PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The battered bodies may be mending, but the minds still struggle.
As many as one in five Haiti earthquake victims have suffered trauma so great with the multiple shock of lost homes, jobs and loved ones that they won’t be able to cope without professional help, doctors say.
In a country where mental-health services barely existed before the quake, building the required support is a huge challenge. The symptoms can’t be diagnosed by stethoscopes, blood tests and X-rays, and can take time to surface after the initial shock of the disaster.
“It’s not about immediate psychological counseling,” said Dr. Lynne Jones, a senior medical adviser for the International Medical Corps. “It’s about assisting mourning. People cannot recover if their social needs are not met.”
Jones, a veteran of natural disasters and wars from Bosnia to Indonesia, is teaching front-line doctors how to identify “disabling fear” and, quite literally, hold people’s hands and listen.
Hugo Emmanuel is one of the untold thousands who doctors say have lost the ability to cope.
“Stay away! I don’t want you to touch me,” he barks at an American nurse who only wants to wash his shattered lower leg.
Emmanuel, 49, is an educated man of spindly limbs but voluble spirit .
For days after he arrived two weeks ago, he only let the hospital director feed him; he claimed everyone else was trying to poison him.
He lost his house, both of his parents and his job.
“Every time I think about losing my family, I lose my mind,” he said.
Port-au-Prince’s only psychiatric hospital is barely functioning. All but 11 of its more than 100 pre-quake patients were removed by relatives who feared the building would collapse in another quake, said Dr. Peter Hughes, an Irish psychiatrist who arrived late last week and is studying what to do.
It is not known how many mental- health workers are available to help.
