Mental health is another battlefront for Ukrainians in Russian war

At a daycare center in Dnipro, Ukraine, children are only allowed to attend a nearby elementary school in person for two to three hours at a time to protect their safety. Afterwards, they must return to the church-run center to finish their studies, so that another shift of children can rotate to the school for classes. This is because the school’s air raid shelter can only accommodate a limited number of children when the air raid sirens inevitably sound.

“Our generation has children of war and we have to understand what we can do with them later, when the war is over,” Serhii Vivchar, who runs the center, told CBS News.

More than two years after Russia launched its brutal invasion, the impact on the mental health of Ukrainians continues to increase every day. It affects everyone, from children to soldiers, women who have suddenly become single mothers, refugees separated from their families, and elderly men and women who cannot leave.

Along with other volunteers, Vivchar runs several programs at a church day center for displaced children and teens ages 7 to 15. The facility offers help with homework, crafts, games and sports.

For Vivchar, the mental anguish of war is deeply personal. Although he has been in Ukraine since the start of the war, his wife and 7-year-old daughter live in Britain as refugees.

The constant threat of air strikes hangs over Vivchar and those around him. Everyone knows someone who was killed in war, he said.

“All the time, you know that Russian rockets can land near you and you can die,” he said. “It’s a fear, and everyone feels fear. We don’t know when and where it happens. It’s a very strange feeling.”

But talking about the mental health repercussions of the war and the trauma it caused is unusual in Ukrainian culture, said Ukrainian-American Andrew Moroz, who founded a faith-based aid organization called the Renewal Initiative to serve Ukrainians.

“They are not ‘feelings’ people,” said Moroz, a pastor of a church in southwest Virginia who has made several trips to Ukraine to support people in the war-torn country of his birth. “They’re ‘get it done’ people: ‘Whatever the problem is – I don’t care what the manual says – I’m going to fix it.’ And that goes back centuries and centuries.”

This month – Mental Health Awareness Month in the US – Moroz traveled to Ukraine with a group of American therapists and pastors to lead a mental health retreat and provide individual counseling to about 90 aid workers, community leaders, soldiers and spouses. soldiers. They visited the hard-hit Donbass region to meet frontline soldiers.

“Ukrainians have been involved in various conflicts for a long, long time,” Moroz said.

“It’s a matter of survival. They kind of repress and suppress their feelings.”

But as the war continues with no foreseeable end, Ukrainians are increasingly seeking help to deal with their stress and anxiety, Moroz said.

“Soldiers are starting to return home and their communities don’t have support systems for them,” Moroz said. “(Communities) are starting to put the pieces of the puzzle together, realizing, ‘We’ve got to serve these guys better; we’ve got to serve their families.'”

At the retreat, Moroz met two women in their 20s whose husbands were best friends and who had signed up to fight on the first day of the Russian invasion. One woman’s husband was killed, while the other’s husband is still fighting but “is a shadow of himself,” Moroz said. “He is empty emotionally and spiritually and physically, and his wife is not sure how to connect with him.”

While many Ukrainians may remain silent, “inside they have stress, they have feelings of depression,” said Vivchar, who attended one of the mental health retreats.

“When you start and talk to everyone, in their words, ‘We can feel the pain,’” Vivchar said.

Alessandra Sacchetti, regional technical director for Europe at the Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Network, said Ukrainians are “extremely resilient” but face high levels of stress day after day as the war rages on.

“Right now, people are figuring out how to be resilient and how to continue to cope,” Sacchetti said, adding that after two years of war, “people are just nervous right now.”

A December 2023 Study by the non-profit refugee advocacy organization HIAS found that 26% of Ukrainians suffer from psychological distress, including depressive symptoms. An estimated 1.5 million are at risk of mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety, the study found. Respondents with the lowest well-being scores included women, Ukrainians in the hardest-hit southern and eastern regions, people over 46 years of age, and the poorest groups.

Although 85% of those interviewed pointed to life events as the main factors for their psychosocial suffering, 38% said they thought the main cause must be character flaws, such as weakness.

Sacchetti said sleep deprivation, which exacerbates stress and other mental health issues, is a big problem. She works with teams who spend nights in many bomb shelters across Ukraine.

“They keep saying, ‘We have trouble sleeping, we have a whole country that has trouble sleeping,’” she said. “When you have alarms and sirens that go off at night or in the morning, that’s sleep deprivation.”

Moroz also suggested that the U.S. delay in aid and weapons to Ukraine has increased anxiety. Congress ended up approving a foreign aid package with $61 billion in aid to Ukraine in April, but remains obscure when many of the desperately needed weapons and ammunition will arrive, or how much impact this will have on the frontline battles Ukraine has been fighting in recent months, I’ve been losing.

Some Ukrainian soldiers Moroz met with said they were grateful for the latest promise of U.S. aid, but they have already been waiting for months as supplies and ammunition dwindle and deaths mount.

“It was like the air was sucked out of the system,” Moroz said, “and there was skepticism about ‘we don’t know how quickly this help will get here.’”

The latest round of Ukrainian aid includes some mental health funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Sacchetti noted.

The Ukrainian government is also working to provide more mental health resourcessaid Sacchetti, but for now, fighting the war remains his main concern.

“It’s important for everyone to understand that even when we go through the emergency, this is the time when people will need it most,” said Sacchetti. “There needs to be attention to long-term recovery.”

Moroz encouraged Americans to donate to organizations that support the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual needs of Ukrainians.

Ukrainians need to know that they are not forgotten, Vivchar said.

“When Americans visit Ukraine… we see how God reminds us that you are not alone,” Vivchar said.