The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) communications officer, Laura Bormes, has said that her organisation has provided psychological support to about 81,000 victims of the insurgency raging in the northern Mozambican Cabo Delgado province.
The figure represents 10 percent of the total number of the Internal Displaced People (IDPs) in the province.
The Economic and Social Development (IDES) chairperson and political scientist, Fidel Terrenciano, told Mozambique’s Centre for Investigative Journalism (CJI) that psychological wounds are mostly overlooked after conflict as the “most urgent thing in an armed conflict is to treat the wounds caused by war.”
Hence Terrenciano adds that “it is also urgent to face the mental and psychological disorders that happen and are not visible.”
Unfortunately, the future is likely to look bleak for most IDPs suffering from trauma as a result of the insurgency that began in October 2017. This has to do with various factors, not least of which is the paucity of professional psychologists in the province, let alone in Mozambique.
Antonio Saide de Carvalho, director of the provincial hospital in Pemba, the capital of Cabo Delgado, told Mozambique’s Centre for Investigative Journalism (CJI) that the province has “51 psychologists, 7 of whom are here, and the rest are distributed throughout the districts”.
This means that a challenge is likely looming in the horizon. Bormes acknowledges that “the big problem is the sustainability of psychosocial support for the victims of terrorism” after the insurgency.
Comment
The government and its partners will have to come up with a strategy to tackle what could be an upsurge of mental health cases in the regions hit by the insurgency. There could be an emphasis on helping the IDPs materially to the detriment of their mental wellness, especially because psychological wounds are mostly invisible.
This is likely to be compounded by the fact that most victims are likely not to seek support. Even in Mozambican urban settings and amongst the so-called middle class, people are ashamed to procure psychological services.
Furthermore, some special attentions will have to be focused on minors, girls, women and the elderly since these are the population groups that mostly bear the brunt of the armed conflict.
As such, any planning must include specialised psychological care to protect people with mental health problems. Not addressing the mental health issues among the hordes of IDPs, is likely to have severe long-life consequences on the social and economic lives of people who were both exposed directly and indirectly to the war.
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