Psychologists are struggling to help stricken locals cope with PTSD while facing their own grief after intense bombing
Ludmilla Boiko can’t sleep. Every night, before going to bed, she takes pills that eventually shift her into unconsciousness. “No normal person can go through this and come out without traces,” she said.
Those who lived through the Russian occupation are some of the worst affected, on what leading Ukrainian psychologists see as a spectrum of trauma experienced by the whole country, including those who have left. “There were people who were still alive under the rubble of two apartment buildings, just down this road. They were there for 20 days. They were calling out for food and water but every person who tried to go near them, to help them, was shot at. There were children there. They all died when they could have been saved – 40 people.”
“These guys are just golden, they are stars,” said Panok of the work undertaken by Boiko and her team in Borodyanka. Panok has known Boiko since the early 1990s, when he was responsible for developing Ukraine’s national psychology programme. The psychologists do not give advice. Instead, they offer tactics that people can use to help solve the problems they are experiencing on their own and to stave off feelings of panic as much as possible, said Tatiana Sushko, one of the Borodyanka team.Photograph: Natacha Pisarenko/AP
She described how she and her husband left their basement one day to make a hot drink in their kitchen and were forced to throw themselves on to different floors of their house when a bomb flew overhead. She said there was one particularly intense day of bombing where she wondered if anyone in the town had survived.
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