The New Yorker:

Dr. Yasser Abu-Jamei on providing counselling services to Palestinian children: “When relatives are killed, we try somehow to calm the child and then ask questions: What are you going to do tomorrow? What are you going to do the day after tomorrow?”

By Isaac Chotiner

For more than two decades, Dr. Yasser Abu-Jamei has worked at the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, the largest mental-health organization in the Gaza Strip, which he has been running since 2014. Gazans have long faced an array of mental-health challenges brought on by Israel’s blockade of the territory, which began in 2007, and its frequent bombings and raids. Since October 7th, the Israeli government has prosecuted a military campaign that has displaced most of the population of Gaza and killed more than thirty-three thousand people.

I recently spoke by phone with Abu-Jamei, who left Gaza for Egypt, where he arrived about a week ago. We discussed how he has managed to continue his work in the past six months and how he has approached treating children specifically. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Can you tell me a little bit about the history of the work you do?

The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme is a non-governmental organization that was established in Gaza, in 1990. It was founded by the late Eyad el-Sarraj, who was a human-rights activist and psychiatrist. This was around the time of the first intifada, when he was still working at a psychiatric hospital, the only mental-health facility on the Gaza Strip. And he noticed that many of the people were coming to the hospital talking about the difficulties that their children faced. These were not mental illnesses that required hospitalization but, rather, symptoms of the hard conditions that people were under in the eighties.

He was thinking all the time about what he could do to help children and their families and the community at large cope with difficulties, and how he could alleviate the implications of the living conditions, the occupation. He was introduced to the concept of community mental health. And that’s basically when a multidisciplinary team that is composed of a psychiatrist and psychologist, social worker, and maybe a psychiatric nurse simply works together to offer what we now call social psychiatry or community psychiatry.

El-Sarraj began with a handful of technical people, professionals who joined him to establish the first community center. One of his main goals was to help children and their family members who were victims of torture or ill treatment, or ex-detainees who were in Israeli prisons. He also tried to provide some counselling and awareness-raising sessions to the community in order to combat stigma associated with mental-health issues.

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