I wrote on Gaza’s mental-health crisis for The New Yorker
Gaza’s mental-health workers are trying to heal others while carrying their own grief. This is what they told me.
It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write.
This piece sits with the emotional wreckage left by this war. It follows the therapists and psychologists still trying to help others while they themselves are displaced, grieving, and surviving with almost nothing. Many have lost entire families, sleep in tents, and treat patients with no medicine, no functioning clinics, and no rest. And yet, they show up to hold what they can.
These providers shared the invisible labor of emotional survival, discussing children who play games called air strike and act out death, and their parents who break down in front of their kids.
I carried this story for months before I could write it. It shows how the people in Gaza try to remain human when everything around them has collapsed.
If you read it, I hope you sit with it. Let it stay with you a while, and shift how you see Gaza, through the quiet work of those still trying to help others live.
Here’s the link to the story: Treating Gaza’s Collective Trauma
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Thank you, as always, for reading and for not turning away.
Thank you Mohammed for writing and sharing this important article. I hope it
is read widely. I cry silently and breathe through the pain and tell myself this is not about you(me)while reading the article. Not to detach myself from it but to prevent the overwhelm of feelings that are stirred up by reading it and being too familiar with PTSD.The anxiety of knowing that so many people if they will even survive are traumatised for the rest of their lives of their lives which is very hard to recover from even in the best circumstances and it will never leave at best you are given the right tools to cope and survival mode is not the best way of living a full healthy and happy life. I won’t say it can’t be done. So again Mohammed thank you for writing and sharing this so important story. And an enormously big hug from me. 🫂👊❤️
Very sad and moving commentary.