How War Reshapes Mental Health and Art Therapy Practices With Traumatized Civilians and Soldiers

Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 confronted Ukrainian health and mental health care providers with unprecedented challenges regarding ever-rising numbers of both civilian (adult/children) and military patients afflicted with previously unheard-of traumatic experiences. 

At First Lviv Medical Union, Unbroken Hospital in Lviv, practitioners not only discovered new forms and techniques of treatment for severe trauma patients, but they also radically transformed the Soviet-inherited hospital structure into a mental health center whose guiding philosophy is both existential and psychoanalytic. Paradoxically, the unfathomable nature of war-related injuries, losses, perverse violations of intimate spaces that their patients experienced not only forced the clinical staff to confront seemingly impossible treatment dilemmas, but also opened new spaces in the team for creative collective thinking and invention. In this potentially overwhelming exposure to the effects of extreme violence on the human body and psyche—a kind of violence whose effects were called “radioactive” by an experienced clinician in the field (Dr Yolanda Gampel) — how have clinicians at Unbroken Hospital struggled to rearticulate the conventional notions of “therapeutic care” and of “self-care”? What has allowed them to juggle between proximity and distance, “empathy” and “neutrality,” and what means do they use to process their own conflictual, psychic, and affective responses to war with themselves and with each other? What were their patients’ responses to both war-related traumatic exposure and being welcomed in this novel environment?

This panel aims at drawing out the specifics of subjective and collective experiences – of success, satisfaction, or failure, impasse, frustration, perhaps secondary, traumatic experiences — that have allowed for shifts in theoretical and therapeutic perspectives, — surprise, glimpses into the abyss, new horizons – on both the individual and collective levels.

PARTICIPANTS:  

• Oleh Berezyuk, M.D. Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Assistant Professor Dept of Psychiatry & Psychotherapy of Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University, Head of Mental Health Service at First Lviv Territorial Medical Union.
• Ulyana Krynytska-Berezyuk, M.D., Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, Co-Director of Mental Health Service at First Lviv Territorial Medical Union.
• Orest Vasylyk, art therapist, psychologist, psychotherapist, Mental Health Center St Panteleimon Hospital, First Lviv Territorial Medical Union.
• Roksolana Yurchyshyn, M.D. Child and adolescent psychiatrist, child psychotherapist, neurologist, Mental Health Center St Panteleimon Hospital First Lviv Medical Union, Lviv.
• Oleksander Filts, M.D., psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Professor, Head of Dept of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University. Consulting psychiatrist at Mental Health Center First Lviv Territorial Medical Union.

MODERATOR:

Beatrice Patsalides Hofmann, Ph.D., psychoanalyst, Paris.

The event is a part of a discursive public program "The Chalk Circle" which will take place in several institutions across Lviv, running in parallel with the exhibition The Stammering Circle curated by Marta Kuzma, presented by Faktura 10 and RIBBON International.

Credits

Cover image: UNBROKEN

Gallery: Iryna Sereda