App Brings Mental Health Help To Survivors Of Libyan Flood Disaster

A team led by a Libyan doctor is providing mental health services in the area of northeastern Libya recently ravaged by flood waters and collapsed dams caused by Storm Daniel.

Cleanup operations are ongoing but constrained by resource limitations, with the current death toll varying between 4,000 to 11,000, with a looming threat of disease outbreaks in the Libyan city of Derna.

“Right now, there’s an acute demand for trauma counseling, grief support and stress management,” says Libyan doctor-turned-tech-CEO Mohamed Aburawi, “We’ve mobilized a team of 40 remote mental health professionals offering consultations in the local Arabic dialect.”

Aburawi explains that local collaborators including Ali AlRowai Psychiatric and Mental Health Hospital in Benghazi (the largest mental health care facility in the northeast of Libya) were able to conduct over free mental 1,000 consultations over the last week or so.

A quick response could prove decisive: a 2013 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed early mental health intervention in the aftermath of disasters can substantially reduce the risk of chronic psychiatric disorders, while a 2018 study showed telehealth interventions for mental health can save up to 40% of the costs compared to traditional in-person care, particularly beneficial in resource-limited settings.

Despite widespread infrastructural damage, many residents still have intermittent internet access and Aburawi says that through partnerships with local telecom companies, his telehealth startup Speetar has been able to offer data packages to affected families, ensuring they can connect to the platform that incorporates localized linguistic and cultural nuances, as well as an in-built AI bot trained on disaster-specific data to help guide patients before they even connect with a specialist.

Libyan Solutions

Aburawi grew up in Libya, studied medicine and did a surgical internship in Egypt before securing in 2015 scholarship to Harvard Medical school.

In 2016 he founded Speetar, a telehealth platform with the aim to link health professionals in the diaspora with patients in their home regions.

Thanks to an agreement with the Libyan health authorities, Speetar was used to help triage cases in Libya’s early days of fighting against COVID-19, meaning that patients could log on from home and can register if they have symptoms, which Aburawi says led to a better managed triage process, that is, determining who needs to get care and the order in which patients are treated.

“Today, we’re not just reacting to a crisis; we’re equipping our local communities with the tools they need to emerge stronger and more resilient for the future,” Aburawi says.

Mental Health in the Global South

According to the World Economic Forum, the economic loss related to mental disorders in low and middle-income countries is projected to amount to $16.1 trillion between 2011 and 2030 and investment analysis research has shown timely mental health interventions can significantly reduce this financial burden.

Abruhawi and his team are part of an international trend of mental health researchers from the Global South being able to benefit communities around the globe.

Lorena Cudris-Torres, a full Professor at the Universidad de la Costa in Barranquilla, Colombia is helping to develop a border-spanning project called “Yo Puedo Sentirme Bien (I Can Feel Good)” which, she explains, is a web-based method for the detection and treatment of common anxious and depressive symptoms, trialed with undergraduates at seven universities in Colombia and Mexico, aged 18 years or older, who had clinically significant anxiety and/or depression.

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Cudris-Torres is a coauthor of a recent paper in the international journal JAMA Psychiatry which found that self-guided internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy (i-CBT) is sometimes equally or more effective for depression (but not anxiety) than similar treatments involving the guidance of mental health professionals.

In the two years of the project’s implementation, 3002 students have participated, finding a satisfaction rate of 92% in the Guided i-CBT treatment and 89% in the Self-managed i-CBT treatment,” Cudris-Torres says, adding that these results show it is possible to find a way to tailor treatment to a student’s profile.

“There is no one size fits all,” she says, “While online psychological interventions do not replace psychologists, they allow to broaden and extend the impact of psychological knowledge for the well-being of the population.”

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