Text Box: War Takes Toll on Baghdad Psychiatric Hospital By ERICA GOODE Published: May 20, 2008 BAGHDAD — In a different time, in another country, where violence and terror did not stalk the streets, Dr. Amir Hussain could practice psychiatry the way he once hoped to. He can see it in his mind: the clean, tastefully decorated hospital wards, the well- stocked  pharmacies, the gleaming laboratory equipment, the thickly carpeted consulting rooms, the halfway houses and outreach teams that help chronically ill patients re-establish their lives outside the hospital.     He has witnessed such things firsthand. In 2005, he left Iraq to spend five months in England, learning specialized care for the elderly and watching psychiatrists at work. But Dr. Hussain, who entered his profession at a time when Iraqi doctors were among the most sophisticated and highly trained in the Middle East, is caught in a time warp in a war-torn land where knowledge and sophistication have been largely overwhelmed by third-world decay, and ancient equipment has plunged some treatments into a “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” Joao Silva for The New York Times The Ibn Rushid psychiatric hospital in central Baghdad, once a jewel of Iraq’s medical system, has been plunged by the war into archaic conditions.   barbarism, despite the best intentions.   He cares for patients whose illnesses are often set off or worsened by the mayhem around them, who crowd into his tiny office at Ibn Rushid psychiatric hospital in central Baghdad, accompanied by their mothers and aunts, wives and brothers. The litany of death and misery they recite no longer shocks him. “We are used to hearing it, and I think our emotions are frozen,” he says. Besides, his own experiences are not that different. Like many other Iraqis, he suffers from some symptoms of traumatic stress: insomnia, anxiety, a tendency to start at loud noises. “The traffic jams, this is a stress, then all of a sudden something explodes,” he said. He tries when he can to listen to relaxing music. The trips to the countryside he once enjoyed are no longer an option. The roads are too perilous. Nevertheless, he does his best to help his patients. Some he treats with the limited number of psychiatric drugs at his disposal. For others, patients who are suicidal or catatonic or do not respond to drugs, he prescribes electroconvulsive therapy, administered with a 25-year-old machine that, he says, has “technical problems.” The patients are sometimes given Valium before the treatments. But because there is no anesthesiologist on staff, the shocks are delivered without anesthesia, as they were decades ago in the United States.  Dr. Hussain is acutely aware that what he has to offer is far from ideal — that the way the hospital gives electroshock therapy is “inhuman and dangerous,” that patients do not receive the panoply of special programs and therapies routinely available in other countries. “I feel frustrated,” Dr. Hussain said. “I feel sad. I see the correct things but I cannot do them because there are barriers and limitations. We do not have the equipment, we do not have the treatable medication.” Despite that, he says, patients often improve. Only 4 of 11 psychiatrists remain at Ibn Rushid; the rest have moved north to Kurdistan, where the risk of kidnapping or assassination is lower, or have fled the country. The psychiatric hospital, one of two in Iraq, provides short-term treatment and was once considered a jewel of the country’s medical system, renowned for its modern care. Patients from as far away as Syria and Jordan came for treatment, and the hospital’s 75 beds were always full. Specialists from Western countries visited to teach the latest forms of treatment. But Ibn Rushid’s fortunes have fallen with those of the broken city around it, a decline that began under Saddam Hussein and that has grown steeper each year since 2003. The paint on the walls is cracking. Tattered lace curtains cover the windows in the hallways. In the morning, Dr. Hussain sees patients in the hospital’s outpatient clinic: a woman who became psychotic shortly after the Americans entered Baghdad in 2003, convinced that she would be hit by a bullet fired from the television set; an 18-year-old who watched a cellphone video of a close friend being tortured and killed and later became so violent that his family tied him down with a rope. The psychiatrist listens, lifts his glasses to read a medical chart, probes for more information. His cellphone — equipped with a photo of Oprah Winfrey — rings constantly. Staff members push through the thicket of patients, asking him to sign forms and authorize treatments. He assesses each case in a few minutes, writes a prescription or orders a test, and moves on. Khalida Ibrahim, a social worker at the hospital, said that treating patients with physical injuries might be difficult, but trying to help depressed patients who have lost children, husbands, sometimes whole families, is emotionally exhausting.      To READ FURTHER (click)  

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FACTS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT ISRAEL


In recent years the pariah state of Israel, under the protection and with the support of the US government, has been violating the basic human rights of the occupied Palestinians with impunity.  The following facts are just a few of the oppressive measures which are kept from us, the international community, by the US-sponsored pro-Israel media:

 

 

Missed previous "Did you know?
<http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/category/did-you-know/>  series" You can find
them here <http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/category/did-you-know/> !

<http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2007/10/27/did-you-know-12/> Source

 

 

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