‘Anger, sorrow, anxiety’: Healing scars of Turkey’s quake victims

Experts say psychosocial programmes should be implemented in the region to educate and help people cope with trauma and go back to routine life. “Earthquake survivors might give abnormal reactions for a period of time and these abnormal reactions should be evaluated as normal after the shock since they cannot express their feelings in a healthy manner,” said Malkoc. “An adult who wets their pants for no reason, cannot sleep or cannot enter closed spaces are some of such reactions on the extreme side we observed in the past among survivors.” PTSD cases According to data shared by Turkey’s Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change, the disaster affected some 13.5 million people in the country. “Studies show that the vast majority of people who go through mass traumatic events such as disasters, if they have enough social and material support, they are able to heal from traumatic stress responses in six months to one year by using their own resilience capacity,” said Yumbul, adding that psychological first aid followed by group therapy sessions should be implemented in disaster areas to accelerate and help with this process. “If individuals still show heavy symptoms of traumatic stress after … then we provide individual psychotherapy.” Experts say post-traumatic stress disorder is the most common condition seen in disaster survivors, as many witness their relatives and friends die or stay stuck under the rubble for days before being saved.