Ukraine: Mental health in times of war – acute and long-term
According to the UN, as of November 2023, the mental health of 15.6 million Ukrainian families has deteriorated as a result of the war. Overall, 25 percent of the Ukrainian population are at risk of developing a mental illness due to the ongoing psychosocial burden of war. In addition, a growing number of former combatants suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Unresolved grief, emotional exhaustion, and an uncertain future: “We work with the affected people to help them regain their strength amid their perceived powerlessness,” says psychologist Olena Romanova from Malteser Ukraine.
Support on two levels
Together with Malteser Ukraine and the local partner organizations Mental Health Service and Words Help, Malteser International (MI) launched a two-part Nexus project in 2023, combining urgently needed aid and longer-term social measures. One component provides people who are immediately at risk with low-threshold services like health education and psychosocial services as well as training for medical staff. The longer-term measures include specialized psychotherapeutic services and awareness-raising activities as well as discussion groups and creativity courses. These are intended to strengthen the resilience and social cohesion of the population, which has been disrupted by war and displacement.
Children are one of the focus groups of both components. “My daughter was under constant stress and felt depressed, but now she sleeps peacefully, no longer sobs at night, aggression has disappeared, and she started making new friends,” says Veronika, 36, who got displaced from Bakhmut and visited the psychosocial center in Kyiv together with her nine-year-old daughter. Through the health education that is part of the project, children and adolescents learn to recognize and deal with stress and anxiety – an important investment in their future mental health, which will continue to be strained for as long as the war lasts.
Vital synergies
Be it visiting schools or offering services in community centers: low-threshold measures enable project staff to identify severely traumatized people and refer them to specialists within the project if required.
These and other synergies between the two Nexus components are the particular strength of this project, which will support more than 50,000 people affected by war in the area of mental health over the next three years.
"Unfortunately, there are no children left here that are not affected by the war. Almost everyday, students must stop studying and spend hours in bomb shelters. Some of them can cope with the stress, while others suffer from panic attacks," says Khrystyna Halushchak, head of the Center for Psychological Support and Assistance of Malteser Ukraine.
(August 2024)
