Coping with loss: UoP offers free trauma counselling for APS survivors

Students, teachers face personal battle to overcome psychological damage.

PESHAWAR:

The Competence and Trauma Centre at the University of Peshawar (UoP) is offering free therapy and counselling for the survivors of the Army Public School (APS) attack. 

Although repair work at the school is near completion, students and teachers now face a personal battle to overcome the trauma and the psychological damage triggered by the incident.

“It will be very difficult for these students and staff members of APS to come back and join the school,” Dr Erum Irshad, head of the university’s psychology department and its trauma centre, told The Express Tribune.



According to Irshad, students and teachers who witnessed the incident have deep psychological scars. “They have lost their children, friends and siblings,” she said. “Moreover, parents who have lost their children in the tragedy also need help.”

The provincial government has extended winter vacations at all government and private schools until January 12 to give students and parents time to recover from the tragedy.

However, Irshad claimed students may find it difficult to return to classrooms where their friends were targeted and brutally killed.

In order to counter this, the trauma centre has started therapy and counselling sessions for all APS survivors, Irshad added. “These include students, teachers, parents and other staff members,” she said. “We hope to provide these students and teachers with special therapy and counselling to help them recover from the trauma.”

According to Irshad, these facilities will be provided for free. “We also plan to provide psychological first-aid training and provide better treatment to the survivors,” she said.

She urged all students, teachers and parents to visit their centre and cope with the tragedy in an effective manner.

APS came under siege on December 16 by Taliban gunmen who brutally took the lives of 150 people, including over 130 schoolchildren. Nearly a week after the heinous attack, Chief Minister Pervez Khattak announced psychologists will be hired to help survivors cope with the trauma.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 1^st, 2014.