Earlier this month, IOM missions in Ukraine and Lithuania organized the two-day training for 50 Ukrainian mental health professionals on how to counsel people experiencing traumatic loss and grief. This is a third IOM-facilitated training for Ukrainian mental health professionals aimed at supporting specialists working in war situation since last year.    

“More than 500 days have passed since the start of the Russian Federation’s 24 February 2022 military invasion. Many lost their family members, friends, many people went missing. To bear this pain, people need emotional support and assistance from professionals who know how to help a person in grief and mourning,” said Eitvydas Bingelis, Head of IOM Mission in Lithuania.     

 “War brings a lot of loss. Loss of lives, homes, health, stability, and sense of certainty and justice,” added Mantas Jersovas, a psychologist at IOM Lithuania who coordinated the training. According to him, this is affecting the whole nation. Psychologists will have an important role to play not only helping people in a consultation room but also in cooperating with artists and media to memorize the losses and to look for new meanings of what happened.  

IOM training  was led by Jana Javakhishvili from the Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry (FGIP),  a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and professor at Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia. Participants  were provided with theoretical background and practical case studies on how to work with people experiencing traumatic loss and  grief in war situation. Since psychologists in Ukraine work in a situation never experienced before, they look for new approaches. The training helped participants to share their insights, to conceptualize them, but most importantly to feel validated of how they are working with the clients back home.  

Olha Savychenko , a professor of psychology from Zhytomyr, Ukraine, shared that more and more people contact specialists because of anxiety, panic attacks, traumatic experiences and losses. According to her, training sessions like the ones organized by IOM provide a good opportunity to learn from each other and conceptualize what has been observed in practice: 

“The war has touched everyone in Ukraine, therefore the topic of war is unavoidable in every conversation. In the consulting room we fight for people’s minds, their resilience, and values. And we must win. There is no receipt or golden words to heal grief and mourning. But we can learn to contain pain, to think not only about what one has lost but also what will remain even after loss”,said Olha.   

IOM Lithuania’s Mantas Jersovas echoed Olga’s observations: “Traumatic experience prevent positive memory and meaning-making. If we don’t have meaning or a story to tell, fragments of traumatic loss will pop-up and scare us. But if we have a story, it helps us to glue these fragments together. And loss and grief become bearable.”   

The war in Ukraine lasts for 10 years already. And for more than a year, people in all the regions of the country live in anxiety, they have lost homes, jobs, loved ones. News in Ukraine became a sort of necrology.  

“In the last year, I haven’t seen a child in my consulting room who wouldn’t initiate a game related to war – tanks, shelters, armament. Many people suffer:  sleepless nights, constant worry and responsibility, anxiety about the future. Elderly people are often held hostage because they cannot always take care of themselves; also, their values ​​and faith in “the brotherly people” have been destroyed, their children and grandchildren are forced to take up arms. But this war has made us also more resilient, stronger, more conscious. It is difficult for each of us, but we are united more than ever,” says Olha Savychenko .