Meet the Central African Republic’s only practising clinical psychologist
There are 4.6-million people in the Central African Republic . Flora Pasquereau, the country’s only practising clinical psychologist, thinks that most of them have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.This is an understatement. Since it began in late 2012, the civil war has reached every town and village. The violence has altered the fortunes of every family, from every socioeconomic strata, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless and thousands dead.
The exercises combine deep breathing, stretching and traditional dance moves. In her office, in a house on the outskirts of Bangui that doubles as her home, she explains: “You can call it yoga or meditation. Even if you take one minute, for one minute you forget about everything, so when things that are difficult happen later on, you can go back to this kind of therapy and have your relief. A miracle solution doesn’t exist. Those little things like yoga or meditation can help people”.
It is exhausting, all-consuming work, but Pasquereau cannot see the CAR recovering without it. “People are so traumatised they start to only live for today, not tomorrow … Imagining a brighter future is very rare. No one wants to be a teacher or a doctor. They want to be a soldier, to kill rebels.” Once trust is established, the hard work begins. The clinicians try to divide people with similar experiences into groups — a group for women who have been raped, for example; one for victims of torture; another for people who have seen their relatives killed — and then teach basic coping mechanisms.
“Some of them, when they ask questions, it’s actually a personal concern. They have gone through such experiences. They would like to have an answer, like a kind of therapy, like a quick diagnosis just to clear up a point in their life. So when you answer the question it’s like you are generalising, but you know that the question has been asked specifically for himself.”
Pasquereau has also succeeded in putting mental healthcare on the national agenda for the first time. She organised a conference in October last year to talk about mental healthcare in the country, and what needs to be done to improve it. She has had positive feedback from the government,
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