IRAQ: Displaced children suffer depression and poor health

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/362750bf0db426717d4db0800df9f7e5.htm

BAGHDAD, 27 June (IRIN) - Twelve-year-old Barek Ahmed has been diagnosed as clinically depressed after his family was displaced by violence two months ago. Now living with his relatives in Baghdad, the boy laments the fact that he has left his school and friends behind, and will not be able to join a new school in the capital because of a lack of places so late in the year. snip

Ahmed is being treated by Dr Ibraheem Fatah Youssef, a professor of psychiatry at Baghdad University, who said that every month dozens of children come to him with the same problem: depression caused my lack of school attendance compounded by violence countrywide.

"These children have lost most of their freedom," said Dr Youssef. "For them, school is the only opportunity they have to run away from all this violence. If they lose that chance, they feel like prisoners in their own homes."

[Ksec]

1. I feel for the Iraqi children

and what bush and Saddam have done to them. Its really sad that their lives have been ruined by these madmen.

[leftchick]

2. bush is a baby killer yet he wants to save the "pre-born"

:(



An unidentified mother and child sit in a tent at a camp for internally displaced people housing 23 Shiite families in Diwaniyah, 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Baghdad, in Iraq Monday, June 26, 2006. The continuing rise of sectarian violence is causing increasing numbers of Iraqis to leave the neighborhoods and towns where they live and seek refuge in areas where their religion - Sunni or Shia branches of Islam - is in the majority, like the families in the camp who were forced to abandon their homes when Sunni gunmen distributed leaflets warning them to leave or be killed. (AP Photo/Alaa al-Marjani)