Diary: A Psychiatrist in Gorazde
Lynne Mastnak, 21 August 1997
Monday. Something has happened in Gorazde. I have the feeling I am on the receiving end of an exponential increase in violence and distress, as if my being a psychiatrist here has suddenly given people permission to go mad. This morning, instead of preparing my seminar, I had to see a young woman who had stopped me in the hospital courtyard two days ago saying she was having a nervous breakdown. The story is a simple one: Elvira is 18 and she and her husband are refugees from a village near Visegrad (now in Republika Srpska). They share two rooms – a bedroom and living-room/kitchen – with his sister and her husband. The latter couple sleep in the kitchen, but the two women were fighting all the time, so Elvira decided to set up separate cooking facilities in the bedroom. This led to an almighty family row, with her husband threatening to leave, and Elvira running out and jumping into the Drina. As she sits there with dark shadows under her eyes, wringing her hands, saying she hadn’t wanted to die but did not know what to do, I suddenly recognise her. Back in Britain, I had been seeing her counterpart on the emergency wards at least once a week for two years: there’d been a row with parents or boyfriend the night before and she’d reached for a bottle of paracetamol as one clear way of communicating intolerable distress. Here the river is more accessible, and while I can reassure the girl that she is not going mad, and that getting the family together to talk about the conflict might provide a more lasting solution than the injections of diazepam she has been getting from the emergency room, I cannot provide new accommodation or any possibility of a return home.’