War piles yet more trauma on Lebanon's exhausted people

Ask a Lebanese person how they are, and you're likely to be met with a heavy pause or a pained smile. Years of crisis have drained them, and now Israeli air strikes are pushing many to breaking point.

Cartoonist Bernard Hage, who draws under the name Art of Boo, summed it up a few weeks ago with a layer cake.

These layers are "Financial Collapse", "Pandemic", the 2020 "Beirut Port Explosion", "Political Deadlock" and "Mass Depression".

"War" is now the cherry on top.

Carine Nakhle, a supervisor at suicide helpline Embrace, says the trauma is never-ending.

"The Lebanese population is not OK," she said.

The hotline's some 120 operators take shifts around the clock all week to field calls from people in distress.

Calls have increased to some 50 a day since Israel increased its air strikes against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah on September 23.

The callers are "people who are in shock, people who are panicking", Nakhle said.

"Many of them have been calling us from areas where they are being bombed or from shelters."

Israel's bombardment of Lebanon, mostly in the south and in Beirut's southern suburbs, has killed more than 1,100 people and displaced upwards of a million in less than two weeks.

Tens of thousands have found refuge in central Beirut, whose streets now throng with homeless people and where the traffic is even more swollen than usual.

- 'Huge injustice' -

Every night, air strikes on the southern suburbs force people to flee their homes, as huge blasts rattle windows and spew clouds of debris skywards.

Ringing out across Beirut, the explosions awaken terrible memories: of the massive 2020 Beirut port blast that decimated large parts of the city; of the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006; and of the 1975-1990 civil war.

This latest affliction comes on the back of years of the worst financial crisis in Lebanon's history that has plunged much of its middle class into poverty.

Rita Barotta, 45, lives near the relatively quiet Christian-majority town of Jounieh north of Beirut.

She says she cannot hear the air strikes, but also that she no longer has the words "to describe what is happening" to Lebanon.

"I no longer know what being me 15 days ago looked like," said the university lecturer in communications, who has thrown herself into helping the displaced.

"Eating, sleeping, looking after my plants -- none of that's left. I'm another me. The only thing that exists now for me is how I can help."

Networking on her phone, Barotta spends her days trying to find shelter or medicine for those in need.

"If I stop for even five minutes, I feel totally empty," she said.

Barotta almost lost her mother in the Beirut port explosion, and says that keeping busy is the only way for her not to feel "overwhelmed and petrified".

"What is happening today is not just a new trauma, it's a sense of huge injustice. Why are we being put through all this?"

- 'Just can't any more' -

A 2022 study before the war by Lebanese non-governmental organisation IDRAAC found that at least a third of Lebanese battled with mental health problems.

Rami Bou Khalil, head of psychiatry at Beirut's Hotel Dieu hospital, said all Lebanese were struggling in one way or another.

"Lebanese have a great capacity for resilience," he said, citing support from family, community and religion.

"But there is this accumulation of stress that is making the glass overflow."

"For years, we have been drawing on our physical, psychological and financial resources. People just can't any more," he said.

He said he worries because some people who should be hospitalised cannot afford it, and others are relapsing "because they can no longer take a hit".

Many more people were relying on sleeping pills.

"People want to sleep," he said, and swallowing pills is easier when you have neither the time nor the money to be treated.

Nakhle, from Embrace, said many people sought help from non-governmental organisations as they could not afford the $100 consultation fee for a therapist at a private clinic.

At the charity's health centre, the waiting list for an appointment is four to five months long.