When a young Kurdish man hosted in a temporary reception center in Milan started swiping through some pictures on his phone, one of the center's staff members was shocked by what he saw. An image of a man hanging by his neck appeared on the screen. "This is my friend," said the Kurd, with apathy in his voice.
"They hanged him just because he was Kurdish," recalls Massimo Chiodini, the coordinator of the center's temporary shelter program. Two days later, the man tried unsuccessfully to take his life, jumping out of the window of his room on the second floor of the center.
He had fled Iraq. But he could not run away from the unbearable burden of the violence he had witnessed.
Be it a treacherous journey through the Mediterranean on flimsy boats or dodging border patrols, teargas canisters and water cannons in a desperate trek across the Balkans, the migrants' path to Europe is not just a threat to physical integrity. Mental health is at stake too.
At the beginning of September, the German Chamber of Psychotherapists warned authorities that at least half of the refugees arriving in Germany are suffering from trauma-related mental issues, with more than 70 percent of refugees having witnessed violence and around 50 percent having directly experienced it.
Forty per cent of refugee children evaluated in the study had witnessed violence, the chamber's president Dietrich Munz told a press conference. Around a quarter "had to watch family members being attacked," he said.
[For more of this story, written by Matteo Congregalli, go to https://news.vice.com/article/...ing-europes-refugees]
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