by MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE
A Kabul psychiatric center tries to help patients through medications and therapy. With limited funds and ingrained views about mental health, it is a challenge.
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan—
The group therapy session at Afghanistan’s flagship mental health hospital began, as many do, with sharing.
Foruzan, 28, a slight woman in a black and silver head scarf, told the psychologist she was possessed by an evil spirit, or jinn. She sought help at a shrine, she said, and thought she was healed. But then the heartburn returned.
Beside her, Parvin, 20, a rosy-cheeked student, who like other patients at the hospital asked that only her first name be used, said she suffers intense headaches and needs medication to think clearly at school.
Worst off was Shaima, 35, hunkered in a corner weeping into her blue burka. Her husband beat her, she said, and threw her out of their house the night before, leaving her at the mercy of her brother, who calls her crazy because she is always crying.
It was a typical morning for Abdul Wahab Yarzada, a psychologist at the 60-bed Kabul Psychiatric and Drug Dependency Treatment Center. Each day, he hears a flurry of maladies, many related to the ongoing conflict, from fishar (stress) to asabi (nerves) to jigar khun, which literally means “liver blood,” but describes a sense of hopelessness.
Some have already chosen to, as they say in Dari, “leave this world”: withdraw rather than confront the adversities of life in the war-ravaged country.
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