To keep children safe, a daycare center in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro allows them to attend a nearby primary school for only a few hours at a time. They must then return to the church-run center to finish their studies so other children can take their places. This is because the school’s bomb shelters can only accommodate a limited number of children when air raid sirens sound.
“We have a generation of children who were born of war, and we need to understand what we can do for them after the war is over,” Serhiy Bibchar, who runs the center, told CBS News.
More than two years have passed since Russia launched its brutal attack. IntrusionThe toll on Ukrainians’ mental health continues to grow every day, affecting everyone from children to soldiers, women who suddenly find themselves single mothers, refugees separated from their families, and elderly men and women who are unable to leave the country.
Vivcher and other volunteers run several programs at the church’s day center for displaced children and young people aged 7 to 15. The center offers homework help, crafts, games and sports.
For Vyvchar, the trauma of war is deeply personal: he has been in Ukraine since the conflict began, but his wife and seven-year-old daughter live in Britain as refugees.
The threat of airstrikes is a constant looming over Vivchar and those around him, and he says everyone knows someone who died in the war.
“You always know that a Russian rocket could fall on you and kill you,” he said. “It’s scary, it scares everyone. You don’t know when or where it’s going to happen. It’s a very strange feeling.”
But talking about the mental health effects of war and the trauma it causes is rare in Ukrainian culture, said Andrew Moroz, a Ukrainian-American who founded a faith-based aid group for Ukrainians called the Renewal Initiative.
“These are not ‘feeling’ people,” said Moroz, a pastor at a church in southwest Virginia who has traveled multiple times to Ukraine to support the people of his native, war-torn country. “They are ‘getting it done’ people. ‘Whatever the problem, I don’t care what the manual says. I’m going to solve it.’ This is a centuries-old mindset.”
This month is Mental Health Awareness Month in the United States, and Moroz traveled to Ukraine with a group of American therapists and pastors to host a mental health retreat and provide individual counseling to about 90 aid workers, community leaders, soldiers and soldiers’ wives, who traveled to the hard-hit Donbas region and met with soldiers on the front line.
“Ukrainians have been embroiled in various conflicts for a long time,” Moroz said.
“It’s a survival thing. They repress and suppress their emotions.”
But as the war continues with no end in sight, Ukrainians are increasingly seeking help to cope with stress and anxiety, Moroz said.
“Soldiers are starting to come home, and their communities don’t have the systems in place to support them,” Moroz said. “(Communities) are starting to put the pieces of the puzzle together and realize, ‘We’ve got to serve our soldiers better. We’ve got to serve their families.'”
At the retreat, Moroz met two women in their 20s whose husbands were best friends and had fought in the first days of the Russian invasion. One woman’s husband was killed in action, the other’s is still fighting, but “they’re not the same,” Moroz said. “The husband is spiritually and emotionally empty, physically empty, and the wife doesn’t know what to do with him.”
While many Ukrainians may remain silent, “inside they are carrying stress and depression,” said Bibcher, who attended the mental health retreat.
“When I started talking to people, in their words, ‘we feel the pain, too,'” Bibchar said.
Alessandra Sacchetti, European regional technical director for the Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Network, said Ukrainians are “highly resilient” but experience high levels of stress every day as the war drags on.
“Right now, people are trying to figure out how to be resilient and how to cope,” Sacchetti said, adding that two years into the war, “people are really on edge right now.”
According to a December 2023 survey by non-profit refugee support organization HIAS, 26% of Ukrainians are experiencing mental distress, including depression. The survey found that an estimated 1.5 million people are at risk of mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety disorders. Respondents with the lowest happiness scores included women, Ukrainians in the hardest-hit southern and eastern regions, people over 46 years old, and the poorest.
Eighty-five percent of respondents indicated that life events were the main cause of their mental distress, while 38% said they believed the main cause must be a weakness or other character flaw.
Lack of sleep is a big issue that exacerbates stress and other mental health problems, said Sacchetti, who works with teams who spend the night in the many bomb shelters across Ukraine.
“They keep saying, ‘We have a sleep problem, the whole country has a sleep problem,'” she said. “When alarms and sirens go off in the middle of the night and in the morning, it’s because of lack of sleep.”
Moroz also suggested that the unrest was fuelled by U.S. delays in delivering aid and weapons to Ukraine. Congress eventually passed a foreign aid package in April that included $61 billion in aid for Ukraine. It remains unclear It remains to be seen when much of the badly needed weapons and ammunition will arrive, or how this will affect Ukraine’s frontline fighting in recent months. Losing.
Some of the Ukrainian soldiers Moroz met said they were grateful for the latest U.S. pledge of aid but said they have already been waiting for months as supplies and ammunition dwindle and deaths mount.
“It was like the air had been let out of the system,” Moroz said. “There was some skepticism: ‘We don’t know how quickly this aid is going to arrive.'”
Sacchetti noted that the latest aid to Ukraine also includes mental health assistance from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The Ukrainian government also Increasing mental health resources“But right now, our biggest concern is fighting the war,” Sacchetti said.
“It’s important for everyone to understand that even after the emergency has passed, that’s when people will need us most,” Sacchetti said. “We need to look at long-term recovery.”
Moroz encouraged Americans to donate to organizations that support the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual needs of Ukrainians.
Ukrainians need to know they are not forgotten, Vyvchar said.
“When Americans visit Ukraine, we see God reminding us that you are not alone,” Bibcher said.
