Psychiatrist Reaches Out To Youngsters In Pakistan

He shot dozens of photos. Some captured the stunning beauty of the snow-capped Himalayas. Others depicting landslide damage in surrounding hillsides told another story, the reason Dr. Craig Stuck had traveled to Pakistan for a three-week stay. A year after a powerful earthquake struck in the fall of 2005, the effects of the country's largest natural disaster were still strikingly obvious. "Here is where a whole village slid off the mountain," explained the assistant professor of clinical Neuropsychiatry, pointing to another picture. The simple homes he photographed in the country's northwest frontier were either severely damaged or completely destroyed. Tents dot the countryside, serving as shelter for people whose land was swept away or who haven't yet been able to rebuild.

Already acquainted with Pakistan after seven years there as a medical missionary, the child psychiatrist was drawn back to the country in December 2006. His goal was to volunteer his psychiatry skills to children suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. "How do you counsel kids who have lost so much and have continued deprivation?" he asked himself before he headed overseas. The answer came in whatever means he found possible.

While some youngsters were referred to him by the local hospital in Ghari Habibulla, most of the children he encountered on visits he made to schools throughout the countryside. As he talked with schoolchildren who had lost a family member in the earthquake, he found that every one of them was experiencing symptoms of PTSD. Many had trouble sleeping at night, plagued by frightening recollections of the earthquake. As students sat outdoors on mats at their rural schools, the psychiatrist asked them to draw pictures of these memories. "Since I knew what I was going to be able to do was limited, I just focused on one strategy. We talked about how to interrupt the frightening images when they started to come at night and how to focus instead on something pleasant that gave them comfort," he explained.

Though he knew there would be little to no psychiatry resources for the Pakistani children once he left, Dr. Stuck focused on what he could accomplish while he was there. In each encounter, he kept to heart a lesson he learned from a missionary couple in the country years earlier. "You love the person that God brings into your life that day and make a commitment to do your best to help him or her," he said. One such experience was with a 17-year-old girl who was struggling with the death of a favorite uncle and an ill mother. Their time together not only encouraged the girl, but resulted in her mother getting started on TB medication. "Her mother's improvement will free her from responsibilities at home so she can continue to follow her dreams. If this was the only person I had met with it, the trip still would have been worthwhile," he said.

Dr. Stuck's commitment also extended to the adults that needed his help. "When someone dies, the women gather in the home to grieve with the family and the men gather outside. There were 82 women in a house when the earthquake hit; all of them died."  Dr. Stuck spent two hours with the man who had found the women's bodies and was plagued with visions of the corpses at night. As he did with the other people he counseled, Dr. Stuck explained to the man that his reaction was to be expected under the circumstances. "I also tried to emphasize the strategies that were already working for him. If this man had activities to occupy him, he coped much better that way."

While he returned to the United States in late December, Dr. Stuck hasn't forgotten about the devastation he witnessed in Pakistan. "When you see such overwhelming need and then come back to a country that is so rich in resources, you feel really challenged to find more ways to help people. I need to forge some new roads there – I just don't know what they are yet," he said.

Reprinted from Connections newsletter, May 2007

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