Experts say ‘resilient Lebanese’ have good overall mental health
Daily Star
22
Oct
2013
By Elise Knutsen BEIRUT: Despite surviving a protracted civil war, continued regional volatility and perennial political instability, studies have shown that the Lebanese people exhibit average incidences of mental health disorders. “We are not sick people,” Dr. Elie Karam, head of clinical psychiatry at St. Georges Hospital University Medical Center, proclaimed at a conference Saturday. “We have less mental health disorders than most Western countries. We have much less than the U.S.” According to a large, nationally representative study conducted by Karam and his colleagues in association with Harvard University and the WHO, approximately 17 percent of the Lebanese population suffers a mental health disorder in any given year. Just 6.1 percent of the population, however, suffers a full-fledged personality disorder. Karam noted that, as is the case throughout the world, anxiety and depression are the two most common mental health issues in Lebanon. The vast majority of Lebanese people have remained mentally resilient since the war, noted Dr. Charles Baddoura, president of the Lebanese Psychiatric Society. “The Lebanese war ... did not paralyze us,” he said. “There is no lost generation.” “Those who reinserted themselves into society after the war have very few pathologies,” he said. Others, however, have had trouble adjusting to peacetime. “Those who lost standing and authority when the war finished, they suffer more psychological problems.” Baddoura was similarly optimistic about the current regional volatility. “There is an anxiety that’s enveloping all of the Middle East,” he said. “We can’t say that we [the Lebanese] are completely indifferent to this anxiety,” he said. “But it does not cripple us.” Baddoura said he could not estimate the number of Lebanese who are prescribed psychoactive drugs. Moreover, attitudes toward mental health are changing in Lebanon, Baddoura claims. “Today, it’s no longer taboo to seek out help for a mental disorder, an illness like any other. There is less and less of a stigma associated with seeing psychiatrists and psychologists,” he said. Copyrights 2011, The Daily Star - All Rights Reserved 22/10/2013 Source Link
