Mental health after collective trauma: a Lebanese reflection

I have practiced in Lebanon since 1996. I have seen war, recovery, currency collapse, an explosion that broke the city, and waves of grief I did not have textbooks for.

What thirty years has taught me is that a population's mental health is never the sum of its individuals. It is a weather system. When the air is poisoned, every body breathes it. When the news is heavy, every dream is heavy.

And yet, Lebanese resilience is not a myth. It is a learned skill, passed down at kitchen tables and in waiting rooms, in jokes that arrive before the tears do. My job, in this practice, is not to manufacture resilience. It is to give it room to breathe.

If you are reading this and you are tired, I want you to know two things. First, you are not weak, your nervous system is responding rationally to an irrational context. Second, healing is still available. Not perfection, not erasure of what happened, but a life that is yours again.

— Dr. Nicole Hani