The suffering of the Lebanese Sandra Abi Nader summarizes what tens of thousands of Lebanese who lived near the port of Beirut have gone through.
Although three weeks have passed since the massive explosion that killed more than 180 people in Beirut and turned entire neighborhoods into devastation, Sandra was unable to get past what happened. "Several days ago, I was trying to open a jar and his voice was strong, so I screamed and felt that I had to flee."
Sandra, 18, realizes the scale of her ordeal, but is not interested in seeking help from professionals. "We used to deal with our problems ourselves," she says in a calm tone.
Sandra's handling of the issue is common in Lebanon, a country that has been hardened by wars and sectarian conflicts and where social stigma still dominates people's perceptions of psychological problems.
But the explosion ravaged Lebanon at a very critical time, with a grinding economic crisis that has been going on for months, and the Corona virus pandemic has increased its severity.
Doctors are now warning of an emergency mental health situation nationwide, as people are beginning to show symptoms of shock due to the explosion, including flashes of painful memories, nightmares, crying, anxiety, anger and exhaustion.
Psychiatrists say that the constant display of pictures of the explosion and its bloody consequences on Lebanese television and social media has exacerbated the problem.
"Every time we say that things cannot get worse in Lebanon, it happens in one way or another," said Jad Daouk, a volunteer with the non-governmental "Impress" association concerned with mental health and answering the phone at a crisis center set up by the association. People feel hopeless about the whole situation here in Lebanon. "
The association - which usually receives between 150 and 200 calls a month - says that more people have been in contact with it since the port blew up.
The association has sent volunteers to work continuously in one of the affected neighborhoods, and home visits have begun.
Many mental health professionals took action in the wake of the explosion to offer their services and spread advice on social media, but some of them are themselves struggling to cope with the trauma.
"I have never heard psychiatrists say: We are not ready to talk now .. We need time to recover. But everyone is in shock ... They need to heal their wounds before they can help others," said Warda Bou Daher, a psychiatrist.
While Sandra insists that she has never shed tears since the disaster, one of her relatives was unable to hold back her tears as she recounted her memories of the explosion that injured 6,000 people, and the sound was so loud that some heard it in Cyprus, 160 kilometers away.
When the blast occurred, Lord Fakhri ran from the store she worked at to her home in the Karantina area near the port, which was one of the most affected by the explosion, fearing that her family had been the victim of the explosion.
"The house turned into a big pile of rubble ... I imagined for a moment that they were sleeping on the floor and the house was destroyed on them," she said.
Lourdes' parents and six siblings survived, but she was still feeling dread.
For those of us older in Lebanon, the explosion revived memories of the civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990 and the Israeli war in 2006 and others.
Ola Khader, a specialist in child psychology, said that many people have never been treated for the trauma they have suffered and do not know how to help their children.
"A lot of people are telling their children that nothing happened. It was a game," she added. "The child deserves to know the truth, but not its most accurate details, and they deserve to know what exactly happened so that they pass through the grief stage necessary for recovery and understand the matter properly," she added.
Experts say that symptoms of shock begin to appear several weeks after the event, as people emerge from a period of "extreme distress".
And the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimated that half of the children it examined had symptoms of shock in Beirut.