****BIRTH PANG WATCH**** THIS IS VERY SCAREY.... Voodoo priests, doctors on frontline of Haitis mental healthcare PORT-AU-PRINCE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Five years after a massive earthquake rocked Haiti, killing more than 200,000 people and reducing homes to rubble, few survivors would say they were traumatised or suffering depression as a result of the disaster. Haitians do not tend to use the word depression to describe symptoms of mental illness. Instead they may complain of a lack of energy or appetite, insomnia, nightmares, a constricted heart or thinking too much, health workers say. Mental illness is still a taboo in the Caribbean nation, which had no functioning mental health system in place before earthquake. In Haiti, it is common for people with mental illnesses to be locked up in hospital psychiatric wards or, believing they are possessed, to seek help from voodoo priests. Yet plagued by guilt, fear, trauma and grief, mental illness remains a reality for many Haitians still struggling to cope with the loss of their relatives, homes and even, limbs, in the aftermath of the Jan. 12, 2010 quake. The impact of the earthquake on mental health was huge and unimaginably deep in peoples lives. Some lost all benchmarks and references because of their great loss, said Reginald Fils-Aime, a doctor with Zanmi Lasante, a Haitian medical NGO and sister organization of Boston-based Partners in Health. news.yahoo/voodoo-priests-doctors-frontline-haitis-mental-healthcare-161110750.html
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 20:18:46 +0000
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