Healing the pain

LIZA LIN & YEO GHIM LAY

Many survivors need help to deal with mental trauma of losing loved ones.

Maybe if she had only held on a little tighter. Maybe if the waves had not slammed her against a coconut tree.

Maybe if she had not lost her grip, the waves would not have snatched her six-month-old baby girl from her arms out to sea.

Such feelings of guilt continue to wrack 38-year-old Pi Thilakamaney, adding to the immeasurable grief of losing five of her seven children to the tsunami.

"My children were all very beautiful," she said tearfully, clutching an album filled with their photos.

When the disaster struck, her two sons and other two daughters, aged between five and 12 years, had been playing near the sea.

She was at home, less than 100m from the sea and caring for her baby when the waves swept in.

"Thinking about it, my head hurts. Sometimes I feel giddy and lose consciousness," said Madam Thilakamaney.

Two of her children are buried near the refugee camp where she has been staying since the tsunami in the Kalmunai province of Ampara, eastern Sri Lanka. The other three bodies were so badly decomposed that they had to be cremated.

Her surviving children, aged 13 and 15, are studying in Colombo, eight hours away by road. Her husband works in a nearby rice mill.

She does not want to return to the spot where her former home stood, and not even the cramped living conditions in the camp - where about 50 families of labourers and fishermen stay in small canvas tents with only zinc roofs - are enough to force her to go back.

"The people who did not lose anything can stay there, but how can I, when I have lost everything?" she asked.

Nine months after the tsunami killed more than 30,000 people in Sri Lanka and displaced nearly 483,000 from their homes, the trauma continues to take its toll on survivors' mental and emotional well-being.

According to the World Health Organisation, most survivors go through the grieving process and recover.

But about 5 per cent to 10 per cent develop persistent problems such as depression and chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. Severe depression, with suicidal thoughts, hits another 1 per cent to 2 per cent.

And many of these simple folk are unable to articulate how wretched they feel.

Instead, mental disorders manifest themselves as physical afflictions, said Dr Boris Budosan, a Croatian psychiatrist with the International Medical Corps (IMC), which helps to run daily mobile clinics in Kalmunai.

"You see them coming to the mobile clinic with all sorts of imaginary complaints - headaches, stomachaches - that do not exist," he said.