Sawt al Niswa | صوت النسوة - AUB

Mental Health Advocacy in Lebanon: Fighting Stigma Without Providing Access

Lamia Moghnie — Sun, 23 Jul 2017 21:00:00 +0000

A poster for the Embrace 2013 “Fekko el 3e2de” campaign

Joumana Talhouk

If you look up the work of leading NGOs on mental health in Lebanon today, you will come across numerous awareness campaigns centered around fighting the stigma on mental illness. Embrace, for example, has launched a yearly event entitled “Break the Stigma” in collaboration with the AUB Psychology Student Society, where patients share their experiences with different mental disorders. IDRAAC’s work is also heavily focused on mental health awareness campaigns, including periodic lectures in schools and universities.

Obviously, such initiatives are much needed to challenge the dominant attitudes of ridicule, disrespect, insensitivity, and aversion towards people with mental illness. Breaking the stigma not only means compelling society as a collective to understand the reality of mental illness though; it also helps individuals recognize the symptoms of mental disorders and urges them to seek care if they present with these symptoms. But, how can one even access mental health care in Lebanon?

With the exception of the free healthcare (of doubtful quality) that one could receive at the primary health centers of the ministry of health's network, one usually has to set aside a hefty budget to get proper mental health treatment. Currently, the overwhelming majority of private insurance companies do not include mental health in their healthcare coverage, not even if one is willing to pay a higher premium for it, and certainly not for outpatient care. This may be the case because people still do not consider psychological or emotional suffering to be “real” or a “medical problem.” But one also has to wonder how much the excessively high prices charged by psychologists and psychiatrists play a part in deterring insurance providers from covering their consultations (especially considering the unique feature of therapy and psychiatric consultations: their need to be repeated periodically).

In the rare cases where mental health is covered, the person seeking care has to overcome many bureaucratic hurdles to secure their right for coverage. For example, to get covered for mental health treatment by Health Insurance Plan (HIP) at AUB, you first have to fill out a request form in person. After a week (if you’re lucky - sometimes it takes up to 3 weeks), you go back to receive a referral to a specific psychiatrist or psychologist on campus. After getting a referral, you take an appointment from the AUBMC psychiatry department. On the day of the appointment, you have to get the referral stamped at the HIP office and give it to the secretary of the psychiatry department. If you do not present this paper before the appointment (but on the same day), HIP refuses to cover the fees. If you need follow-up sessions, you have to ask the doctor to write a report specifying that you are in need of more sessions. This report must be taken to another office to be processed, which usually takes about 1 week. Then, you have to go back and take another referral, specifying how many follow-up sessions will be covered automatically. Again, on the day of the next appointment, you have to take the paper given by UHS and get it signed by HIP. And the cycle continues. (Note: HIP actually only fully covers the first 3 sessions).

Step-by-step guide to HIP mental health coverage prepared for students by the AUB Graduate Student Society

Few patients end up completing this overwhelming bureaucratic process process to actually receive mental health services. I stopped my therapy because of the countless steps required of me; I was too depressed to go from office to office getting signature after signature in order to feel better.

So, if you have been graced by one of the mental health awareness campaigns and realized that you need care, you’d have to pay $50 weekly on average to see a psychologist and maybe an additional $100 periodically to see a psychiatrist, or go through a million procedures (which, ironically, your mental condition might prevent you from doing) to get coverage.

While it may be important to fight stigma, it is flagrantly shortsighted to do so when people who would like to seek mental health care simply cannot.

Publisher:

Sawt al' Niswa

Section:

Opinions

Category:

Opinions

Tags:

Featured:

Strike: It is your right, for your right and theirs

Lamia Moghnie — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:15:03 +0000

Yasmine Ali

Very few newspapers headlined the strike which started yesterday at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Many started a campaign on Facebook to invite their fellow students to join them in the strike and discuss the administration’s decisions. Initial responses came from people outside the University who criticized the “bourgeois revolution,” of “AUB students who finally realized education should be affordable.”

What happened yesterday at AUB – and what’s planned to happen later - might have been breaking news on all media. But it is not. The university administration announced 25% increase in tuition fees for future students. Why? Because the University is apparently losing money, but it also wants to “help” needy students to attend AUB. How? By increasing the fees and – supposedly – increasing financial aid support.

The truth is the University is planning to raise the fees for all students. Thus, AUB will be inaccessible (which is already the case for a large social class) except for the really rich, or – if we believe the financial aid will not be corrupt – the really needy. The middle class will be excluded from the campus. Talk about social diversity!

Furthermore, the new tuition fees will force a large portion of the students to depend on loans and financial aid.

Action

The students met with the Provost on Tuesday for roughly two hours. The meeting went nowhere, and it underlined the administration’s unresponsiveness to the students’ demands to cancel the increase, as it presented figures and budget plans, which were at the least unverifiable.

Shortly thereafter, two meetings took place: One with the University Student and Faculty Council (USFC) members, parties and clubs representatives, and another informal one including unaffiliated students. The meetings went on till 11:00 PM, as participants discussed future steps and strategies.

On Wednesday, the strike started. More than a thousand students circumambulated the campus, disrupted classes and called on their colleagues to “boycott the classes,” a slogan probably inspired by the university’s group of activists shouting last week for the boycott of Israeli-connected corporations invited to the campus for the job fair.

Then at noon, a mass strike took over the Main Gate and totally paralyzed the campus. It went on till 5:00 PM. “We won’t pay,” shouted students under the sun. The administration’s response was once again: We don’t care. After the strike, students met again for long hours to discuss the next steps. Today, the strike continues.But this is what I learned so far:

    - We are alone against the administration which is very zealous in talking about “democracy,” “education” and “freedom,” turning them into empty words in practice. We are basically outlaws and are treated accordingly.
    - We are fighting the battle for future students, as the increase will only affect them.
    - We are trying to break the totalitarian control of a business-oriented institution, which is supposed to be educational.
    - Generalizations, cynicism and unrealistic judgments will lead nowhere. It is true AUB is financially inaccessible to a large portion of the region’s populations. It is true that yesterday among the roughly 1,500 demonstrators on Main Gate, I could count hundreds of Prada sunglasses. But the battle is that of classes. It IS a demand of inclusion in an institution that is more and more elitist.
    - While the administration boasts about financial aid and loans it will be offering its students, it is doing so by following a neoliberal system of making individuals dependent on credit.

How wonderful is the future? 21-year-old fresh graduates carrying on their backs university loans exceeding 25,000 dollars, and I don’t know how much of the national debt…

Publisher:

Sawt al' Niswa

Section:

Opinions

Category:

Activism

Tags:

Featured:

‘The day we put on our masks’

Lamia Moghnie — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 08:09:15 +0000

Yasmin Ali

Some student at AUB organized a direct action to counter the visit of the richest man in world to their campus. Yasmin, a feminist activist and an active students who participated in the action wrote to Sawtalniswa, explaining what exactly happened.

Carlos slim visited the American University of Beirut last week. He is the richest man in the world. He came to lecture us, students and professors and followers, about money. Apparently the Business School at AUB decided to draw a clear model of what it is teaching its students_ to become rich or die trying.

Slim is notorious for owning telecommunication companies, and banks forming an oligarchic monopoly. His efforts to incentivize and empower private investments and the private sector were very efficient in weakening the poor in Mexico and the world.

‘The minimum wage in Mexico has fallen in real purchasing power by 75% in the last thirty years. During the presidency of Vicente Fox alone from 2000-2006, it fell by 22%. Ten million workers, 24% of the economically active population, make the minimum wage or less. Fifty million Mexicans live below the poverty line. Of these, 30 million live on 30 pesos per day ($3 US), 10 million live on 22 pesos daily, another 10 million on less than 10 pesos daily.’

‘In the same period, Mexico rose to the 4th top position in the world in the number of millionaires. And it boasts the third richest man in the world, Carlos Slim, who did very well indeed through privatizations. The top 20% in Mexico control 52.7% of Mexico’s wealth while 30% of Mexicans subsist on less than one minimum salary per family per day. ‘

What we decided to do, a bunch of students in solidarity with the dispossessed of the earth is to speak out our indignation towards his visit. We wanted to tell our university that it should have a moral responsibility when inviting guest lecturers, that we don’t agree on feeding business students (and other faculties) the non-sense they are being taught, that we want the students to be critical about what is said on campus/in classes, and mostly, to show our solidarity with the Zapatistas and the workers of Mexico.

So we prepared our Spanish dictionaries, wrote banners and went to the lecture.

We put on our Zapatistas masks, turned towards the public and held our banners. In a split of a second, all eyes turned towards us and the journalists – previously taking pictures of the money Mogul – turned their lenses towards us. And there stood, the colossal old man, the hundreds of followers in the hall, the university’s pride at hosting him, the billions of dollars, We stood to represent the wretched of the earth, those that the companies of Slim and the like disinherit and disperse.We stood there with our fists to show him that they were not alone.

‘Enough, stop capitalist terrorism, and the poor on earth are the same’. We held out our words, our silence, our bodies and our eyes, to fight the arrogance of a rich man.

In no time, the security men (who already work hard to prevent non-AUB from enjoying the rest of green in the city) and body guards ran towards us, eyes bloody with fear and shame. ‘take these masks off, who are you, why are you doing this?’

But we held to our masks, we held to our silence, and we held to each others, facing the people now, outside the glass windows, after they closed the blinds, so the richest man in the world won’t be offended by our eyes. We wore the masks of his compatriots, the Zapatistas, those his actions have directly affected and disempowered and marginalized. They all wanted us out, out of the campus, out of their sight, out of the record of his immaculate visit to our university

And this is exactly what we wanted to say. Our silence was crying out our rejection, the natural refusal of our minds, our bodies and our consciences to receive the carrier of such ideas and actions in our campus. The university is ours, the city is ours. Us, those who nobody asks for opinion, those who work, study and pay, those who put their silence ahead of them to speak of the atrocities and injustices. It is ours because we are the people, we are the ones who live it and change it. We have the right to change it. ‘Let us have a civilized discussion’ she said

‘Why are you doing this, we are educated people’.

Professors and teachers ran to ‘talk us’ out of this, only our eyes spoke to them. ‘you will be expelled’, she yelled at us. We smiled. Do you think we are afraid of ‘that’?

Women in makeup and heels, all happy to welcome the money guru ran towards us. ‘You are freaking people out, why are you wearing this, aren’t you ashamed of what you are doing? ‘3ayb’’.

Words were thrown on us, shouts, security men wanting to hold us, hands, eyes, faces shocked. They all had the very same ‘3ayb’ , shame to hide. How is it possible that we did that to our guest, 3ayb. How is it possible that we are wearing masks like terrorists, 3ayb. And mostly, how is it possible we don’t realize that we are losing the university’s opportunity -of gaining money (?) or at least being mentioned as one of the institutions which received the great man- (of what) and disgracing it, transfiguring it s image as the capitalist colonialist orientalist haven for the wretched of the world, 3ayb.why don’t you expan your idea here by saying how does the teacher’s attitude conflict with the “freedom of knowledge”, “freedom of speech” and “ student’s right to participate in the university’s life.”

Im still wondering, what do the professors who shouted at us think of ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘students’ rights to participate in university life’ concepts? or does this only include activities like the outdoors and cake sale for university students?

We stood outside for an hour, fighting the security men with silence and the questioning students with facts about the guy they were lead by hand by their professors to watch.

These students were also our aim. Around 500 students, eyes open, smiles naively waving at him ‘the richest man in the world’, ‘the one we are majoring in Business in the hope of becoming like him one day’. Every year, Like blank pages these kids are fed the newest, most aggressive and –dare I say- blind concepts of the market. ‘Money, money, money and more money. That is your aim’, they are told.

And how about everything else?

‘So it is happening in Mexico, why should it be our concern?’ ..and this is what they are teaching you in this university. The total lack of care and sensitivity to anyone who is slightly different than ‘them’. And this ‘them’ is meticulously defined and limited to a small geographical, ethnic, religious/sectarian, gender, and political self.

We stood there answering their questions, their ‘whys’ and ‘hows’. ‘why are you doing this? Is he corrupt? Why are you here?’.

‘Why are YOU here?’ we asked, did you read about the guy, did you see what are the effects of his policies and companies and forums.

We were speaking to the university to the students and to the professors. We were not speaking to him, but our silence reached him

Publisher:

Sawt al' Niswa

Section:

Opinions

Category:

hereandthere/من هنا وهناك

Tags:

Featured:

Can AUB find only those Complicit with Zionism to Honor?

Maya El Ammar — Fri, 21 Jun 2002 19:01:00 +0000

Guest Contributor

An Open Letter from anti-normalization groups at the AUB

In the lead-up to last year’s AUB graduation, over one hundred of the university’s faculty members voiced their principled opposition to the bestowal of an honorary doctorate upon a former World Bank president with demonstrated political and economic connections to the Zionist occupation of Palestine.[1] In light of this petition, and numerous messages from AUB students and alumni, as well as others, James Wolfensohn decided not to attend the AUB commencement and was not awarded an honorary doctorate from AUB. In meetings that followed this event, university administrators assured AUB community members that awarding future honorary doctorates would be a more transparent process. The AUB administration also stressed, in a letter to the faculty, that “as an institution of higher learning with an historic presence in Lebanon and the Middle East, AUB is deeply committed to upholding the essential values of academic Freedom, and will do so within the bounds of Lebanese law, which strictly prohibits collaboration with Israeli institutions.”

Directly contradicting this commitment to transparency, AUB administrators have chosen to announce the 2012 honorary doctorate recipients less than a week before the ceremony at which these awards are to be presented. More insulting to the AUB community, as well as to the society in which the university is situated, is that Donna Shalala, one of this year’s recipients, and the one set to deliver the Commencement address on June 22, has established clear academic ties with the Israeli apartheid regime and has been one of the leading voices opposing the boycott of Israel. AUB’s choice of honoree forces us to wonder whether this is no mere coincidence, whether there is a systematic and structural attempt to turn the AUB, through its administration and Board of Trustees, into a normalizing entity, violating the boycott principles that Palestinians under Israeli occupation have called for and that most advocates of the Palestinian cause have endorsed. This shows a lack of concern for the fate of Palestinian victims of Israeli oppression, disrespect for universal human rights, and a disregard for the sentiments of the Lebanese community that supports Palestinian rights.

Ms. Donna Shalala served as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services for eight years under President Bill Clinton. In these eight years, her administration systematically brought about the starvation of the Iraqi people under one of the most brutal sanctions regime in human history; directly killing 1-1.5 million Iraqis, 225,000-500,000 of whom were children.[2] During her tenure as Health Secretary, she accepted honorary degrees from two Israeli universities: the Technion University (in 1994) and the University of Haifa (in 1998). After taking on the presidency of the University of Miami, she has worked to encourage partnership agreements signed between her university and Israel’s Bar Ilan[3] and Ben Gurion[4] Universities. In July of 2011, Ms. Shalala was awarded another honorary doctorate from the Ben Gurion University. At the celebration she stated that “I am honored to share this special day with the students and scholars at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. BGU proudly represents Israel’s abiding commitment to the special values and tradition of higher education.”[5] All four of these universities, as with most other Israeli universities, are deeply enmeshed in discrimination against Palestinian students, Israeli military training and the development of weaponry used against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.[6]

Consistently misrepresenting the boycott of Israeli academic institutions as a boycott of Israeli academics, Shalala has been a leading opponent of the academic boycott. The highlight of her anti-boycott crusade came in July 2010 when she participated in a 13-member delegation of U.S. university presidents to Palestine organized by Project Interchange[7], an offshoot of the Zionist lobby group—and leading proponent of a U.S.-led war against Iran—the American Jewish Committee. The dual purpose of the delegation was to engage these university leaders in developing partnership with Israeli academic institutions—a goal clearly achieved with the University of Miami’s subsequent partnerships—and to fight the academic boycott.
Less than a month before travelling with the delegation, Shalala told the Jerusalem Post that she had “joined the presidents of the major American universities to denounce the boycott of Israeli academics. I sent a personal letter to the presidents of universities here, as did the other presidents, promising there would be no boycott in the United States and that Israeli scholars would always be welcome in the US.”[8] Ironically, but far from surprisingly, Shalala’s Lebanese surname resulted in her detention and humiliation for over two hours by Israeli airport security.[9] Astonishingly, she shrugged off this act of racism by saying: “While I was inconvenienced, Israel’s security and the security of travelers is far more important.”[10]

As with Wolfensohn before her, there can be no doubt that Shalala is an accomplished individual, and even that many of her accomplishments may have benefited groups of people. There are hundreds of people around the world, however, who have done a great deal for humanity without also being complicit in crimes like the sanctions imposed on the Iraqi people, or with the apartheid regime of Israel.

Why are AUB administrators adamant in selecting those marred by such complicity for the bestowal of honorary awards? What makes AUB ignore the ongoing calls and petitions from its own community and the community at large to abide by the principles of academic boycott? What was the role of numerous lectures, conferences and seminars on the Arab Spring held this past year at AUB, if they failed to inspire AUB administration and community to understand the basic value that led to these revolutions, namely: dignity. Why would AUB advocate for a candidate for an honorary doctorate by pointing to their ethnic origin without pointing to their moral principles? These questions are not addressed to the AUB administration, which seems to be disrespectful of voices of its own students, faculty, and staff, and unconcerned to open a dialogue with its own constituency, but to the community in which AUB is embedded. It is about time for the community to oblige AUB to act as an institution embedded in a society that stands by moral principles of humanity, dignity, and equal rights.

Anti-Normalization groups In AUB

[1] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1621

[2] http://www.globalissues.org/article/105/effects-of-sanctions

[3] http://sizedoesntmatter.com/research/israel-us-med-schools-sign-deal/

[4] http://www.aabgu.org/media-center/news-releases/bgu-and-university-of-miami.html

[5] http://www.aabgu.org/media-center/news-releases/bgu-awards-shalala.html

[6] http://alternativenews.org/images/stories/downloads/Economy_of_the_occupation_23-24.pdf

[7] http://projectinterchange.org/?page_id=36

[8] http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=181131

[9] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3931210,00.html