Treating Gaza’s Collective Trauma by Mohammed R. Mhawish

With barely functioning systems and almost no resources, practitioners such as Akhras rely on the few tools they have left: psychosocial support, cognitive behavioral therapy (C.B.T.), and improvised coping strategies. They teach breathing exercises, emotional regulation, and techniques to manage intrusive thoughts. When possible, they coördinate with overwhelmed medical staff to access limited psychotropic medication for patients with severe depression, psychosis, or suicidal ideation. But, as Akhras told me, most professional support has shrunk to voice notes between colleagues that ask just one question: “Are you still alive?”

… There’s no psychological manual for this, no diagnosis that makes it livable. There is a vocabulary of collapse that one learns by living through it. It begins with the grief loop: mourning relatives, then neighbors, then co-workers, then children whose names we never knew. I lost friends, then family, then my block, then colleagues I shared hunger and dispatches with—journalists still reporting as the sky falls. The mourning rotates endlessly.