PESHAWAR, May 7: Nazim Town-1 Haroon Bilour has said that the decades-long war in Afghanistan and Kashmir conflict have badly affected the mental health scenario situation in the region.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the two-day workshop on “Mental Health in War Zones” organized by the Mental Health Resource Centre Pakistan in collaboration with University of Missouri USA here on Tuesday.

Mr Bilour deplored that the children orphaned by these wars could not be compensated and said that probably they would be jealous towards those children, who enjoyed the association of their parents. These children would consider the whole society as responsible for the deaths of their parents, believed he.

He criticized the international community for its cold shoulder response to the pathetic conditions of the Afghan refugees that worsened their condition with each passing day.

The District Government, he said had established a number of BHUs and recently undertook construction of the women and children hospital during its one and a half year tenure. He assured that separate unit would be established at the hospital for mentally retarded patients.

Prof Dr Arshad Hussain of the University of Missouri, USA in his lecture entitled “Recognising Psychiatric Consequences of Disorder” informed about mental health situation at the global level. According to him, trauma was caused by wars, earthquakes, floods, ethnic cleansing and other tragedies and calamities.

He said that most of warring leaders had been traumatised in their early lives, and when they got powers, these traumatised leaders started to satisfy themselves through killings of innocent civilians. He claimed that in Rwanda genocide in just 100 days one million innocent people were killed, while during the course of five years siege of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2,30,000 persons lost their lives.