Opinion: Lessons from Ukraine on protecting mental health during conflict
Sane Ukraine’s work offers an important new path for improving mental health in conflict zones.
In March 2022, one of us, Kristina, was in Ukraine, running a training on a chilly day. Several hours into the training, one of the soldiers’ faces began to crumple, close to tears. The unit had just received a combat stress management skills training, including a box breathing exercise, in the field outside of a converted military base in Chernihiv near Ukraine’s borders with Belarus and Russia. The training involved discussing common acute stress responses, including the freeze response that can stupefy people, and how breathing exercises can support emotional regulation and return to function.
The soldier said, “I wish I’d known how I could help in the past, when one of my friends was captured because he was frozen like that.”
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