Mexico Drug War Aftermath: Mental Disorders, Despair Arturo Sanchez Jimenez - La Jornada
go to original September 23, 2014

Anxiety, depression, pathological pain, despair and post-traumatic stress disorder, are some of the psychological aftermath that violence from the war on drugs has left in its victims. However, the consequences are also observed in witnesses, indirect victims and victimizers, according to the participants in the first Colloquium on Violence, Drug-Trafficking and Mental Health-Wounded Mexico: Psycho-social Effects of the War, which was carried out in the Psychology Department of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

In his introduction to the meeting, the coordinator of the colloquium and professor in the Psychology Department, Rogelio Flores Morales, pointed out that, “the context of violence has had an impact in different environments, including the psychological one. In our field we have been witnesses of emotional disturbance, suffering, despair, pain, defencelessness and loss, not only in the victims and their families, but at the community and social level.”

Fear has spread within the social fabric, he explained, and it has disrupted emotions, cognitive frameworks, family dynamics, personal projects, community relationships and feelings in life. We have also observed, he added, the ability to overcome adverse situations from solidarity and love; what psychologists call ‘resilience’.

At the colloquium's opening, Psychology Department Director, Javier Nieto, said that psychological professionals are called on to develop care strategies for the society affected by violence.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Translated by Penn Tomassetti

Mexico Voices is a blogging endeavor aimed at raising the awareness of U.S. citizens regarding the destructive impact of the U.S. economic policy and the War on Drugs on Mexico — on its people, their economic and physical security and their human rights, on the nation’s dysfunctional justice system, and on the rule of law and Mexico’s fragile democracy. Visit the website at MexicoVoices.blogspot.mx

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