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Pervasive health disparities among asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants are the result of a history of political violence such as incarceration, war, interrogation, threats, and torture. You’ll find the same experience among Vietnamese re-education camp survivors, Egyptian students, Pakistani gay men, Ethiopian shopkeepers, Angolan obstetricians, and Congolese political opponents. Diverse across professions, genders, and races, their shared experience is the violent repression of democracy that manifests itself in their lives as chaos, chronic pain, and illness, sometimes for decades.
We wrote the material about accessing the history of torture because our residents told us they felt uncomfortable talking about this topic in regular historical records and had never seen this pattern in historical records. They felt it was irrelevant to the chief complaint and intrusive since there was no clinical intervention based on the history. But we have found that this is not the case, and that understanding a person’s experience of torture can understand symptoms of disconnection, explain the importance of certain symptoms or illnesses and their connections, help build a therapeutic relationship, and ensure that we “do no harm.”
We first introduced some of this material in 2012, but since then our experience with torture survivors and asylum seekers has broadened and deepened. We just launched a new resource on EthnoMed, Documenting the history of torture, which reflects this experience. This series of videos and related materials highlights the relevance of the history of torture to the ongoing care of survivors of torture and their symptoms and chronic illnesses.
Most of the survivors who generously shared their stories for educational purposes were detained and abused because they represented or spoke for emerging democracies and democratic principles, were either part of the Arab Spring or were political organizers or sympathizers. This experience is experienced by only a small percentage of Americans, but unfortunately is more common among Native Americans and Black people.
Be warned, these materials are difficult to watch. They serve as a stark reminder to many of the true cost of participatory democracy.
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