Pitt psychiatry professors work to heal war trauma in Ukraine
Two University of Pittsburgh associate professors of psychiatry are working to help people in Ukraine deal with the trauma caused by the war.
Dr. Carmen Andreescu and Dr. Alex Dombrovski of the Pitt Psychiatry Department are working with the Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry, a nonprofit based in the Netherlands, to provide Ukrainian psychiatric professionals, hospitals and citizens with supplies and guidance.
Dr. Andreescu, who attended medical school in Romania, had worked with the FGIP there. The organization assists and trains mental health providers all over Europe. It already had feet on the ground in Ukraine and countries where millions of refugees are taking shelter from the horrors of war.
Dr. Andreescu said the Pitt effort involves raising awareness and money. “We tried to make people understand what a huge tragedy this is and how consequential it is going to be from a mental health perspective for decades to come,” she said.
“We tried to make people understand what a huge tragedy this is and how consequential it is going to be from a mental health perspective for decades to come.”
— Dr. Carmen Andreescu
“The amount of violence experienced by Ukrainians at large is absolutely staggering,” said Dr. Andreescu, with many fleeing the country but some also taking refuge in bomb shelters and basements, often with with no running water and very little, if any, food. Front-line workers are also experiencing trauma, she said.
One of the hospitals the FGIP is helping is in the city of Chernihiv, northeast of Kyiv, which was under siege by Russian forces for several weeks. The hospital, which houses 280 patients, was bombed and the patients were moved to the basement.
Staff members who could have escaped chose to stay to care for their patients. With no heat and no running water, staff members
carried buckets of water into the basement.
Robert van Voren, the chief executive of the FGIP, became interested in helping fight against human rights violations as a teenager, after reading about camps in the Soviet Union housing dissidents.
“I wanted to know more, read more, and eventually befriended one of the main dissidents at the time, Vladimir Bukovsky, who [had] spent 12 years in camp, prison and a psychiatric hospital,” said Mr. van Voren. “In my mind – I was then 18 years old – that was the worst that could happen to a person: being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital and ‘treated’ with drugs when being mentally healthy.”
At the time, he said, the Soviets were using psychiatry as a political weapon, labeling anyone who fought against their rules as insane and confining them to mental health facilities.
In 1980, Mr. van Voren was one of the founders of the InternationalAssociation on the Political Use of Psychiatry, an organization that worked to have the Soviet Union expelled from the World PsychiatricAssociation.
Thatorganization became the FGIP.
Beatriz Luna, a professor in the Pitt Psychology Department, is also working with doctors Andreescu and Dombrovsky. They began by reaching out to the Pitt psychiatric community and now have expanded their appeal to UCLA, Vanderbilt, Chicago and other areas throughout the country.
The Pitt professors are in touch with the FGIP every week, getting updates from
Mr. van Voren.
“We developed a psychological aid program in Ukrainian and Russian that operates via a website and social media,” Mr. van Voren said. “Every day we post short advice on what to do in certain situations. For instance, when panicking, in cases of anxiety, suicidal thoughts, desperation,” or supporting children who are filled with fear.
The site allows people to reach out via Messenger to a team of mental health professionals. It has over 15 million views.
The first step, according to Dr. Andreescu, is getting people to put themselves in the shoes of those suffering right now.
Donations can be made at gip-usa.org/publications/.