Soldiers of the Invisible Front: How Ukrainian Therapists Are Fighting for the Mental Health of the Nation Under Fire

Abstract

 Healthcare Under Fire: Stories from Healthcare Workers During Armed Conflict 31 that situation could be classified as so. I took some time to analyse the situation and consult with others . The ethics of the situation were ambiguous—if we helped one patient to shortcut the patient route system, should we be prepared to help all our patients in the same way? Nevertheless, I decided to ask the director for help and support for Lady S. We agreed, that she would arrive on the scheduled day for tests, and the hospital would take care of her during all the next stages of care. At the time, I was in the other region, therefore all those agreements were done by phone. In the end, Lady S was hospitalized and received all the necessary treatment and surgery. The time of her surgery was around the invasion anniversary. It was a difficult time for everyone. Some patients reported that they felt an irrational urge to flee even from the safer western Ukraine. Lady S also had a mentally difficult period, but she wanted to return to her home in the Kharkiv region, some 50 kilometers from the Russian border and much closer to the frontline. Once she disappeared from the region, the hospital administration was searching for her and called us. The psychotherapist and I didn’t know how to approach this situation. On the one hand, we had more of a history with her and knew more personal information about her. On the other hand, not being part of the hospital administration , it was not our responsibility to search for her. Even though, at one time we crossed our usual scope of the help we provide, should we do it one more time? We had a long conversation with the psychotherapist and discussed all possible options. We even discussed the prospect that she returned to a heavily shelled home because she was tired of being an IDP. We decided to provide our private numbers for her relatives, so in case lady S wanted to reach out, she could and knew we were open to hearing from her despite her relocation back to the Kharkiv region. We were very happy to hear that all went well. She came back to the guesthouse for a few days. She is one of the patients with whom I became fairly close. Even though I didn’t visit the field for a while as I was doing other work, very often, our psychotherapist reported back to me about how Lady’s S was doing. Some eyes of the patients I remember more than others, and some kid’s paintings remain with me always. Sometimes I wonder if it is just to feel more compassion for some people than for others. I sincerely hope that each of the people we work with has at least one person in the world to share their worries and thoughts with even if they are far away because only our relations with other people make us humans. B Soldiers of the Invisible Front: How Ukrainian Therapists Are Fighting for the Mental Health of the Nation Under Fire Irina Deyneka & Eva Regel Irina Deyneka W hen the Russian army attacked my country , I became a volunteer for a hotline offering psychological support to those in crisis; refugees, those who were under the shelling , those who were hiding in bomb shelters, and who were directly in the zone of fighting. People were lost and disoriented by constant bombing, by the fact that their country was under attack. Once, I had a woman who lived in Mariupol on one of these calls. I was living then in another city, Odessa, but was experiencing the same horrors of war that my client was—the shelling, uncertainty, and despair. We were processing my client’s feelings of grief and anxiety when I heard the sirens on her end. I offered to stop our session so she could seek shelter. She told me she would not have time to find shelter and wanted to continue our meeting. And so, we continued . . . But soon, Odessa’s sirens broke the silence, and it was my turn to decide what to do; should...