The Positive Impact Of Psychological Follow-Up On The Lebanese Youths Despite Multifactorial Stressors

After the explosion of the Beirut port on the 4th of August 2020, 206 people were killed, more than 6.000 injured, 10.000 have had their houses destroyed and many people have lost their jobs and sources of income. The blast and its trauma came along with many multifactorial stressors such as the collapse of the local currency, food insecurity, inflation of prices, lack of medicines, incapacity to provide medical security and support, cut of electricity in majority of the regions, unavailability of water, immigration, unemployment, fuel crisis, decrease of the education level and on top of them all, the COVID-19 pandemic and the total lockdown of the country. We, as specialist, working either in associations or running our private practice noticed the increase of people in need for psychological support due to the arise of anxiety and depression symptoms. Our main concern was to provide help even though the basics in the society are not met. Methods: Observation was made on field, through connections with different parties: youths form a big number of the employees and volunteers and rarely do they benefit from psychological support. Hence, a questionnaire was launched on "Monkey Survey" platform, 15 questions were asked to 70 individuals aged between 18 and 35 (mean age 26, 58.3% female) to assess the severity of the anxiety and depression symptoms based on the GAD-7 and PHQ-9.60 participants were engaged in group sessions based on art-therapy tools (5 groups of 12 each). The individuals who showed high scores were referred externally to benefit from intensive psychological follow-up and psychiatric intervention. Results: Believing that the questions reflect three main domains: Personal wellbeing, Aptitude to engage in professional activity and interpersonal relationships the 60 individuals followed showed improvement. The scores were as follow: Personal wellbeing: 100% improvement, Aptitude to engage in professional activity: 83.3 % improvement, 16.7 % no change, interpersonal relationships: 91.6 improvement and 8.4 % no change. Conclusion: Despite the fact that a good wellbeing is highly linked to the satisfaction of basic needs, (as per Maslow Pyramid), a psychological follow-up can impact people positively influencing different areas of their life. Keywords: Depression, Anxiety, Stressors, Psychological Follow up.

Author(s): Nancy

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