Then They Started Shooting : Children of the Bosnian War and the Adults They Become (9781934137673) by Jones Lynne

Author:Jones, Lynne [Jones, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781934137673
Publisher: Perseus Book Group

By the mid-1990s, PTSD was regarded by Western professionals and public alike as a serious psychological disorder, and as the most likely response to a wide range of traumatic and stressful events. The suggestion was that it was often unrecognized, even by the sufferers themselves, because of repressive reactions in the victims and avoidance of distress on the part of carers. This needed to be overcome, as PTSD required early intervention involving some kind of re-exposure to the traumatic event, through talk or play, to prevent lifelong damage. Children were considered to be among the most vulnerable. UNICEF stated in its yearbook for 1996 that millions of children had been psychologically traumatized by war in the previous ten years and that (without treatment) “time does not heal trauma.”73 By the end of the 1990s, most large humanitarian agencies had trauma programs. In most conflict and postconflict areas of the world, one could find mental health professionals using symptom checklists to assess the level of pathology, training local residents to identify PTSD, and setting up counseling services to encourage the working through of feelings. Psychological trauma and its treatment often appeared to take precedence over other medical and material problems.

“Surviving under what is arguably the most draconian embargo in modern times, trauma which could usually be expected to lessen with time is intensifying because of hunger and deprivation. Iraqi children have given up playing games because the games remind them of dead playmates,” Felicity Arbuthnot wrote in the Guardian in 1994. Note that she did not suggest that the lack of interest in games might be due to hunger, although she continued, “In July 1993, the UN Food and Agriculture Commission noted with deep concern the prevalence of several commonly recognized pre-famine indicators.” Having pointed out the damage that sanctions and consequent malnutrition were doing to Iraqi children, she ended, not with a plea to lift sanctions or to provide more food aid, but rather with “All Iraq’s children need counseling so that normality and childhood can be restored.”74

In Sarajevo during the siege in 1994 there were seven NGOs running counseling programs. You know 80 percent of our psychological problems would disappear tomorrow, a weary social worker told me one day, if you could persuade your government just to lift the siege of the city. Unfortunately, counseling programs were much easier to achieve than changes in political policy. A focus on individual psychopathology allowed for spurious professional neutrality, creating the illusion of attending to need, while avoiding advocating other social and political interventions that might have a direct impact on the collective mental health of the community.75

Meanwhile, the diagnostic concept expanded. The fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, DSM-IV (1994), no longer required the events to be outside the range of normal human experience. All that was necessary was that the suffering individuals should have experienced, witnessed, or been confronted by an event that threatened them or others they knew with death or injury or damage to their

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