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Baghdad Madness

November 11, 2006 4:16 PM

We spent a recent morning in the Ibn Rushud psychiatric hospital in Baghdad, one of just two psychiatric institutions in Baghdad, a city of over 5 million people.  Ibn Rushud is for acute cases, has 70 beds, and keeps patients for only a matter of days or weeks.  The other hospital, Al Rashad, has over 1,000 beds for patients who need to spend longer in hospital.  And that is it.  Where, I asked Dr. Shalan, the chief psychiatrist, did everyone else with mental problems go?  Surely Baghdad has more than 1,070 psychiatric cases out of its entire population? 

“There is a stigma,” he said, and paused with a pained look on his face.  Iraqis, he explained, are ashamed to seek treatment for mental illness. 

It is not uncommon, even in the developed world, for people to be reluctant to admit they have problems with depression, addiction, violent mood swings and so on.  But with Baghdad’s current violence, the stresses on people are so great that many must be in need of some kind of mental health assistance.  Many of the patients that Dr. Shalan does see have their symptoms caused or at least exacerbated by the violence that is going on in their area. Sleeplessness is a common complaint: It's hard to sleep when you are afraid at any moment of a knock on the door from some death squad, or when you have a friend or relative who has been kidnapped, whereabouts unknown.

Instead of getting good mental health advice, many people self-medicate  with alcohol or medications.  This makes the situation worse.  Dr. Shalan says one of the major problems he sees now is people with a combination of some underlying mental disorder that is complicated with an addiction problem that has been caused by their attempts to numb their problems with narcotics.  Treatment is correspondingly more difficult. 

We did some interviews with the doctors and some patients in the hospital, and I was standing in the small green patch of garden that divided the mens’ and womens’ ward, wondering how to sum up all that we had seen for a short piece to camera, when suddenly a woman who had been lying on a bench completely covered in her black robes stood up and bared her face.  It was like a frame from a Fellini movie –- she was young but had wild, troubled eyes that seemed to look right through me at some terrible vision in the middle distance.  And in perfect English she asked: “What do you want from the Iraqi people?”  I felt a surge of all that guilt that journalists feel visiting hospitals and chronicling peoples’ suffering without being able to alleviate that suffering.  I smiled at her, and said as gently as I could, “I want you to find peace.”  She didn’t react, may not even have heard me, and walked past with her stare still fixed mid-distance.  Her question, I realized, was not really directed at me personally -- she didn't know who I was -- so much as at foreigners in general, those people who had invaded and tried to restructure her country.  And had produced this violent mess.  Who was calling whom mad, I wondered, as we left the hospital to drive home?

November 11, 2006 | Permalink | User Comments (9)

User Comments

Posted by: YS | Nov 11, 2006 6:10:05 PM

Posted by: Luz | Nov 13, 2006 1:53:43 PM

Posted by: Jacqui | Nov 13, 2006 2:59:22 PM

Posted by: dot | Nov 13, 2006 10:52:50 PM

Posted by: Deborah | Nov 14, 2006 12:33:44 AM

Posted by: Jim and Mary Zirbas | Nov 16, 2006 11:17:12 PM

Posted by: Jim and Mary Zirbas | Nov 16, 2006 11:17:37 PM

Posted by: Tiffany Marler | Feb 14, 2007 12:41:30 PM

Posted by: Dr Shalan | Feb 15, 2008 11:27:54 AM

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