I can’t understand what’s going on in the minds of the Russians
Lithuania has become the first country where professional psychiatric help is provided to Ukrainian war refugees in their native language.
Vilnius City Mental Health Center, often referred to simply as Vasaros st. 5, the Mental Trauma Center has been operating for a couple of years now, where two psychiatrists from Ukraine, who have experienced the refugees themselves, work.
Russian-speaking refugees from other countries will also be accepted here.
The institution headed by Martynas Marcinkevičius received the first refugees from Ukraine as soon as the war started.
Some needed psychiatric help due to war traumas, while others had worsening mental illnesses while they were still at home.
Some had to be hospitalized. They were helped by Russian-speaking doctors working here.
But when the flow of refugees asking for help began to disrupt the work of the hospital, it was decided to try to organize consultations after arriving together with specialists from Ukraine.
Free psychiatrists responded to this call, but so far only two could come, from Poland and Spain. They are officially employed.
Due to language barriers
“Refugees from Ukraine came to Lithuania convinced that the war would last for two months.
When it became clear that it would take a long time, we would have to look for housing and work, problems arose,” Roberts van Voren, professor at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, general director of the international organization “Global Initiative in Psychiatry”, told “Lietuvos rytui”.
This professor’s decision to create a crisis center in Lithuania for Ukrainians and other Russian-speaking refugees was determined by the language problem. Because young Lithuanian psychiatrists no longer understand Russian. In addition, we already lack these specialists.
A disused hospital building, which once housed workshops for patients, was adapted for the operation of the mental trauma center.
It is planned that the Center for Mental Trauma will expand, possibly with the installation of wards for Russian speakers.
7 Ukrainian nurses are employed in the hospital. Until the diplomas of these doctors are approved, they work as nursing assistants.
It is not easy to adapt
“When I was offered to come to Vilnius to work, I asked: where are you inviting me, have you forgotten who your neighbors are?”
But now I’m not afraid anymore. I understood that this is a NATO country. Russia will not come here,” said Alina Revko, a psychiatrist-psychotherapist from Mariupol who started working in Vilnius. She came from Poland.
She has been working with a Ukrainian patient for two weeks and has made sure that their main problem is adaptation.
Many refugees cannot adapt to living in Lithuania due to the experiences they have experienced.
The psychiatrist did not hide that she was shocked herself: “I can’t imagine what is going on in the heads of the Russians. Killing the people of another country and explaining that this is how they save them is stupid, to say the least.”
According to A. Revko, some Ukrainians find it difficult to communicate in Russian.
When the war starts, this language gives them unpleasant sensations.
He also worked in Spain
Child psychiatrist Aleksandras Kustodinčevas also volunteered to work with refugee children in Lithuania, but he did not receive a response.
The doctor was invited to Lithuania to swim in Spain, where he worked for three years in an orphanage evacuated from Ukraine.
All the children were considered orphans and had special needs. Most of them suffered from serious mental illnesses, some from cerebral palsy. 84 children were looked after by 6 adults.
The Spanish did what they could: they placed the children in a separate building in a remote village, fed them, and provided medicine. But it was small.
In Spain, the administrators of the orphanages were unable to come to an agreement with the leaders in Kyiv that the children should be separated as soon as possible. A fund in Kiev to bring all the children back to Ukraine.
– Probably, every refugee child needs the help of a psychologist or psychiatrist.
How will you choose who to help first? After all, there are at least 20 thousand in Lithuania. children from Ukraine? – we asked A. Kustodinchev.
– Children adapt much more easily to changed living conditions.
In Mariupol, I work, psychologists in 2014, who with this problem: our city then came a lot of people from other Ukrainian cities under fire.
At first, many children go to psychiatrists, but later I noticed that they adapt much easier than adults.
These were children who saw the fighting in front of their eyes, who were in the shelled premises, saw how their loved ones were killed. They were constantly haunted by fear and haunting images.
– Which caused more damage to the child – the war or forced running away from home?
– Undoubtedly – war. Children easily adapt to new living conditions.
But what they have to experience in the war leaves scars for life.
Fear, anxiety, damaging memories can have very serious consequences.
So far, I have not met such children in Lithuania.
Those who were hard on me complained about adaptations. Or they have problems still in Ukraine.
One teenager was very worried about the upcoming school year and the new school.
– How to help such people?
– If he receives attention, he understands that he is important, if the child feels that he is being treated with respect, he needs time not to think about the experiences he has experienced and perhaps it will be easier to adapt.
– Can teaching the Lithuanian language become an additional problem for them?
– If a child does not have serious mental illnesses, he easily makes contacts and learns a new language.
I communicated with a Ukrainian woman who started sending her child to kindergarten – he says new Lithuanian words every day, which his mother does not understand.
However, learning Lithuanian is no problem for the child himself. But there are children who find it difficult to communicate in their native language.
– Why is it important that the psychiatrist communicates with the child in his native language?
– This is important not so much for the child as for the psychiatrist. This provides an opportunity to establish a closer contact, the doctor can understand the child more easily.
When communicating in a language other than his mother tongue, it is difficult for a child to diagnose an illness and notice some messages.
I remember in Spain, where I worked, a teenager from Ukraine tries to kill.
I heard what the Spanish psychiatrist explained to her colleagues during the consultation about the child’s illness, and I realized that she did not understand his problems.
It has been helping for a long time
There are currently 20 post-traumatic rehabilitation centers in the occupied territories of Ukraine, which were established by the employees of the Vilnius City Mental Health Center with the money of the Ministry of National Defense of Lithuania.
300 Ukrainian specialists worked for ten. In 2015-2019, the Lithuanians prepared them to work with soldiers who returned from battles and relatives of fallen soldiers.
“Even before February 24 of this year, before the beginning of Russian aggression, we had to figure out how to help the people affected by the war,” explained M. Marcinkevičius.
The doctor from Vilnius admitted that medication is a big problem. Almost every day, he receives calls from his colleagues from the occupied areas of Ukraine with pleas to send psychotropic drugs, because there is a catastrophic lack of them there.
Ukrainian psychiatrists are forced to treat patients in Russian who are used to Western medicines.