“There is suffering and healing too. There is trauma and resilience too” An Indian psychologist re-lives his experiences from Ground Zero of Türkiye’s earthquake zone Opinion | yaqeenikander
February 6, 2023. I woke up with contentment after having finished a tedious two-day documentary shoot on mental health in Kashmir, my home state, far away from my workplace in Türkiye for the past six years.
By the time I landed in Istanbul, our clinical supervisor and coordinator at IPAM – Ibn Haldun Psikoterapi ve Arastirma Merkezi or Ibn Haldun Centre for Psychotherapy & Research – were both surveying the earthquake-affected areas. And it did not look good. We landed in the late evening and stayed in a state-run dormitory whose bunker beds reminded me of my younger university days going a decade back. I rested on the lower bunk while my colleague took the upper one. Every time he turned or made any slight movement, I woke up with a fearful feeling of experiencing an earthquake. In the morning, I was sleep deprived but also contemplating how the actual earthquake must have felt to the millions of people.
The same goes true for this Adiyaman campsite. I was welcomed with open arms, and once people discovered that I was a foreigner, which is clear from my heavily accented Turkish, I got all types of questions – from how I learned the language to how I met my wife. Such curiosity led to bonding and people opening their emotions to me. Many mentioned that it was the first time they did so or laughed after the earthquakes.
Each morning we visit the families in various tents in pairs and assess their psychosocial needs. Slowly, the people started recognising me and calling me by my name. They send their children to us to play. And once again, I realised that children are smarter than we think. They have vivid memories of the earthquakes and the loss of their homes and family. They express it through drawings, most of them of homes and buildings – things which they have lost.
As psychologists, we believe that when stories are told in a safe space, it leads to the processing of emotions and healing. This is already happening, and I am glad about it. But it is almost a month since the earthquakes, and we also see a rise in cases of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder .
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