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 people’s 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.
“We still have people coming to clinics with mental health problems related to the earthquake. They talk about the earthquake, about being under the rubble,†Fils-Aime told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview from Boston.
Symptoms of mental illness have been built into a screening tool used by Zanmi Lasante to train health workers, including nurses, doctors, social workers and psychologists, to identify depression among rural communities in central Haiti.
