Week 4: Lost Boys and Post Traumatic Stress

I couldn’t stop thinking about the lost boy in the film who went missing and then turned up on a city bus in the throes of a nervous breakdown, so I decided to find out if there are any statistics on how the lost boys are getting along emotionally and what, if anything, is being done to help them. Here’s what I found out: A 2005 study of 304 Sudanese Lost Boy refugees found that at least 1/5 of them had been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which seems low to me, PTSD in the AZ Lost Boys population has been put somewhere between 80 and 90%). The boys in the study had a mean age of seventeen-and-a-half. 93% of them said that their villages had been attacked and they had witnessed loved ones being killed, and 20% of them said they had been tortured themselves. The boys living in U.S. foster care or group institutions fared the worst with respect to developing PTSD. An article in the Arizona Republic states that the symptoms of PTSD can sometimes take years to develop, but when they do, they put these men and boys a greater risk for broken relationships, domestic violence, and alcoholism. Thankfully the problem isn’t going ignored, and there are avenues of assistance. For example, Outreach Africa: Lost Boy Foundation doesn’t mention mental health directly, but it says that it provides medical and emotional support. Also, the Arizona Lost Boys Center recently received $155,000 that would be used specifically to “address the mental-health issues in the Sudanese community…” In a last example, The Hope of Sudan Foundation provides not only educational and vocational scholarships for NY area lost boys but also trauma healing and emotional support. In short, thankfully, every group I found that works within or to help the Lost Boy community is working in one way or another to offer emotional healing as well, whether that is through counseling, reconciliation with family members, or medical care.