Name: Your brain is wired for trauma. And it can be hot-wired to forget it. | Dr. Essam Daod
Uploaded: 2022-12-10T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 4 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I think that delivering first aid is not just needed for the body.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

We need also to train people to save the soul and the mind of people who are suffering from a traumatic event.

This is a Essam Daod, a child psychiatrist, former surgeon and father.

Four years ago, he and his wife traveled to the Greek island of Lesbos, at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, to help with the relief effort.

These refugees were fleeing a brutal civil war back home and many of them were children.

It was here that Essam came to a startling realization.

Today, all the focus of the humanitarian aid delegation and efforts goes to the basic need of body, shelter, food, and really little goes to the mental health.

In fact PTSD among Syrian refugee children has been so severe that a new phrase was coined to describe it, "human devastation syndrome."

It's not the life that I want as a doctor, as a surgeon, as a child psychiatrist to give to anyone.

Essam realized that something needed to be done and he had to be the one to do it.

When our brain experiences a traumatic event, the toll it takes on our mental health can last for a very long time.

It's an overwhelming experience and when this experience is shaped as bad, it can cause traumatic stress disorder and can cause depression and anxiety and violence and aggression.

I think that we have this very short window of opportunity, what I call the Golden hour, that we can really do the intervention before the you know, the experience can be stored and imprinted in the brain, especially for kids.

Essam explains with a story about Omar, a young Syrian refugee.

He arrived on a boat with his family and he was like terrifying and say, "Don't worry Omar, they are coming to film you, you are a hero across the sea."

The volunteers came around him and start saying, "Omar! the superhero. Let me see your muscles," and he started laughing and he was so happy in less than 15 minutes.

By telling him he's a hero, Essam gives Omar an empowering narrative that he can tell himself for the rest of his life.

And then all these experiences and memories that he had from that event will be stored as something good and that's it, Omar now is not suffering from PTSD.

In 2015, Essam and his wife started Humanity Crew, an organization that provides mental health services for refugees in the Mediterranean.

Humanity Crew, until now, since 2015, delivered 32,000 hours of mental health support to over 12,000 refugees.

The work they do underscores the vital role mental health plays in helping refugees.

But unfortunately with little funding for treatment, millions of refugees are left to grapple with their trauma on their own.

Providing this intervention is not just saving the souls and the minds of the people, which is also the future of them and the future of the whole society and the future of their homeland because they will rebuild it.

I think we can all agree that as human beings, we deserve to see ourselves as individuals with value, as heroes of our own stories, not victims.

I give them the ability to think that they are heroes.

I believe truly that there are heroes and for that we believe Essam is a hero, too.