Crazy for Haiti

I remember in college, when I studied the history of mental institutions, seeing the horrific photographs of inmates in austere, prison-like environments and even barred cells, often chained or otherwise restrained, dressed in ragged hospital robes. Old black and white movies showed electroshock therapy, harsh nurses and burly attendants and forced drug treatments – real pictures of a Shelter Island world. Today, most of our mentally-ill aren’t in treatment facilities at all – they wander the streets in a daze – and our mostly-underfunded and deteriorating institutions are only for those who are a threat to themselves or others or who truly are not able to look after even their most minimal needs. If mental healthcare in the United States is this bad, I wondered, what must it be like in devastated Haiti, where poverty has never given this tiny nation the means of providing anywhere near humane treatment and care facilities… after an earthquake that has restructured virtually every minimal priority in that island nation?

The March 20^th New York Times answered my question, and what they report deeply saddened me. “Inside this [capital] city’s earthquake-cracked psychiatric hospital, a schizophrenic man lay naked on a concrete floor, caked in dust. Other patients, padlocked in tiny concrete cells, clutched the bars and howled for attention. Feces clotted the gutter outside a ward where urine pooled under metal cots without mattresses… As disasters often do in poor countries, Haiti’s earthquake has exposed the extreme inadequacies of its mental health services jus t at the moment when they are most needed. Appalled by the Mars and Kline Psychiatric Center, the country’s only hospital for acute mental illness, foreign psychiatrists here have vowed to help the Haitian government create a mental health care system that is more than just an underfinanced institution in the capital city.”

The trauma of losing loved ones, seeing shanties and what little possessions existed crushed into oblivion and even slightly better-built buildings topple and fall, disease and starvation multiplied, serious medical emergencies threatening the survivors, the notion of never-ending chaos punctuated with occasional nerve-rattling aftershocks and heavy rains flooding what little remains – this is the fertile soil where mental illness can only grow.

The Times observed: “The foreign psychiatrists emphasize that they have found Haitians to be impressively resilient, but the disaster has nonetheless set off reactions ranging from anxiety through psychosis. Most worrisome are cases like that of Guerda Joseph, a 41-year-old woman who tumbled into a catatonic depression shortly after she was pulled from the rubble of her home. Mute and nearly immobilized ever since, she lies on floral sheets at the General Hospital, her Bible tucked beside her pillow, her 25-year-old adopted son by her side day and night… More common, though, is what Dr. Lynne Jones, a child psychiatrist and disaster expert with the International Medical Corps, calls ‘earthquake shock,’ a persistent sensation that the earth is still shaking, which makes the heart race and causes chest pain.”

Time marches on. The headlines speak of war and natural disasters in other regions of the earth. Our economy still shudders with pain. But Haiti’s agony doesn’t end with each new headline of devastation somewhere else. They still need our help… desperately.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I know that Americans will not forget.