Nauru: Refugees & Asylum Seekers are waiting for answers

14 Nov 2018

MSF Psychologist Natalia Huerta Perez was part of the team on Nauru, providing much needed mental healthcare to the refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the Nauruan population.

Transcript


People usually mention like, ‘I am not able to carry on for one more year, or two more years, really like I’m done’.

I’ve been working with migrants for eight years and I’ve never seen this before, like, how sick these people [are]. 

I’ve never seen migrants, refugees, in the same place without information, clear information, for five years. It’s affecting [them] a lot because they don’t even know what’s going to happen. 

They say, ‘So how long do I have to be waiting? Like one month? One year? Like five years?’ So the situation, it makes their mental health more difficult.

So I think that the situation between this population is breaking the good relationship in the families. They are losing communication so they don’t talk between each other.

The illnesses that they have developed are really severe. So I really doubt that this process, or to go back to normality, will be easy.