Twenty-five mostly veiled-female doctors and medical students look nervously toward a projection screen deep in the bowels of Benghazi’s newest hospital.
With little sign that Libya’s four-month old war will end quickly, the class is learning how to help patients — and themselves — identify and treat the psychological trauma caused by conflict.
The city around them is now a rebel stronghold, but its residents were terrorised by Moamer Kadhafi’s snipers and shells just months ago, and the detritus of war is everywhere.
And the eastern front is still a 80 minute drive away, too close for comfort. Only NATO aircraft and a rag-tag rebel army are keeping loyalist fighters at bay.
One person trying to make sure that the students’ can help ease the mental burden of the city’s past and present is the youthful and enthusiastic Libyan psychologist Sarah Elhady.
She stands at the front of the well-appointed classroom and explains what most in the room must know already — at least intuitively: People can deal well with short bursts of stress but can wither under longer barrages.
She asks the class to name some symptoms of stress. The answers — insomnia, fatigue, nightmares, flashbacks, violent behavior, crying — are sometimes given gingerly, but none are wrong.
Elhady and her colleagues at the International Medical Corps will give the same course to school teachers, psychologists and social workers, those on the front lines of Libya’s psychological war.
“These people are dealing with, or who will soon be dealing with survivors,” she told AFP. “They have to have basic information about how to recognise signs of stress, and to know when referrals for specialized help are needed.”
Fears that Libya may be creating a scarred generation mean there is a particular emphasis on dealing with stress in children. But there is also room for some self-help.
“It is useful for them as well, because they are also part of it.”
For doctors operating in the lawlessness that followed Kadhafi’s ousting from Benghazi, being part of it can be more traumatic than simply tending to patients with severed limbs or gaping gunshot wounds.
For one group of doctors working at the nearby Al-Jelaa Hospital it was much more immediate, according to Elhady.
While tending to an injured man in the hospital’s intensive care unit they were forced to watch, powerless, as a gunman entered and finished off their patient.
