Here are the true stories of our patients, as told to Pierre Duterte and reproduced in his book, Terres Inhumaines (Landscapes of Inhumanity) JC Lattès Publishing, 2007.
These patients bravely gave their permission for their story to be published, for it takes a lot of courage to expose one’s private life in such public way.

"So all that, that really happened"

"Ever since I was little, my life has been one big problem. Why go on living?"

"The teenager who wanted to talk about his anger"

Incarcerated for 10 years in an Iraqi prison, he was only allowed to leave his cell blindfolded

"He had been arrested on a street corner, men had rushed out of a car, tied him up and blindfolded him, and threw took him into prison. He remained there for 10 years. Throughout that whole time, he always left his prison cell with a blindfold over his eyes. Not once did he see the prison hallways that he knew only from memory: it took this many steps to get to that office, that many steps and a left turn to go to that place, x number of steps to be led to the torture room. Countless times he walked down that dark and ominous path.

During the seemingly endless months that followed, life stuck to this same pattern. He guarded everything safely in his memory, at least everything that he could retain.

One day, he was finally released; they blindfolded him, put him in a car, and dropped him off at the same street corner where they had arrested him. Once they had placed him exactly where the arrest had taken place, they removed the blindfold, jumped back into the car, and drove off. Haggard, he had ended up alone on that same street in Baghdad.

This degree of theatrical staging obviously requires a great deal of organisation, well-kept records, and a desire to destroy over the long term. Its effects were those they had anticipated. Throughout the months I spent working with this patient, he often hid behind a denial of the past: ’Maybe it was all just a nightmare, maybe I dreamed everything.’

Having his asylum application rejected by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons didn’t seem like a catastrophe: in his eyes, it was as if his Protection officer didn’t believe the story either. Ouch!

However, being granted political refugee status by the Refugees Appeal Commission put an official stamp on the reality of his story. His face was painted with a certain bitter satisfaction when he entered my office, the commission’s decision in hand. Along with visible relief and fleeting joy came the following remark: ’So all that, that really happened.’

His official status as a refugee gave him the quasi-definitive right to live France and ruled out any threat of returning back to the land of his torturers; his travel visa specified that he could visit any country except Iraq. A success. He found it difficult, however, to live with and accept this status. I had to help him fight back against the depression that had resurfaced and allow him to grieve the loss of this illusion that everything had just been a bad dream. And all of that because he had been cast in a terrifying production with a script penned by a merciless playwright.

At this point, how can I not mention the session in which, upon hearing that this patient had never seen the inside of his prison, I offered to show him a map that another patient had drawn from memory for his file. On this map, whose legends were written in Arabic, he immediately identified the “stage manager’s” office and began repeating the footsteps he counted during his 10 years in prison. ’Ten steps to the right… yes, that’s it, once you’re there go take 25 steps and turn right… like that, you pass in front of that, yes, that’s it!’

It was very moving to watch this teary-eyed patient rediscover, in black and white on a piece of paper, a reality that he had previously known only in terms of the number of steps he took.

This story illustrates an even more severe condition brought on by the effects of torture: that of a “derealisation” of the world. “Derealisation” is a sign that the victim’s personality has been damaged and is also a precursor to serious mental disorders that manifest themselves in previously “borderline” patients. The therapist’s mission is therefore to help the victim put the pieces of the puzzle back together…

When victims doesn’t fully understand what has happened to them, they tend to retouch the images of their past in order to make things seem more plausible. This retouching happens less often with the children of torture victims, given that they only know fragments of the story and are more or less unaware of the most sordid details. Why was their father or mother in prison, when now in France, where they are growing up, people tell them that only criminals go to prison?"

That’s what he said to me the first time we met.
He was 17, seemed very angry and very tired; he was tired in the tragic way in which certain Africans often conceive of the term: it’s too hard…

I had been asked by someone at Child’s Services to see him because the young man had refused to speak about his story, saying that he preferred not going through with the asylum application despite likelihood that he would not be allowed to remain in France. In his eyes, it was less painful than rehashing what had happened to him.

His decision not to share his story was not without good reason: the last time he had agreed to speak about the tragic events from his childhood, he felt so awful, so disoriented by having to recall the horrors of memory, that he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for several days due to the severity of his symptoms and the intense suffering they revealed.

Why go on living? Was he wrong? Why go on living when life is nothing but a series of problems that accumulate and become increasingly unbearable? When, after having seen or heard of the death of his brothers and sisters, he had to endure that of his father and then his mother, two more murders to add to the list. And then it came down to just him…

Yes, I said to myself, I can understand that you’ve come to question the reason you should go on living. Why wasn’t I killed? Why did I have to suffer through watching everyone else die around me?

The death of his or her parents is a horrific event for any young child. The tragedy becomes every more acute when it happens in the barbaric or apocalyptic circumstances that he described to me, and when the child is forced to watch his/her parents being murdered. What’s more, as I was listening to the heart-breaking stories, I was struck by how these young people brutally become orphans and are left feeling abandoned.

“My parents let me down.” At first, the claim seemed hard to support. As an adult and as a parent, I more easily indentified with the “injustice” of the idea that his parents were assassinated and then accused of abandonment. The victims are thus seen as guilty in the eyes of their own children. Thinking back, I realize that I was only looking at the situation from an adult’s point of view, which in turn was preventing me from understand it from the child’s perspective. One thing I could not grasp about these teenagers, for starters, was the distress of winding up completely alone, no suitcase to their name, and having only their willpower to rely on for survival.

Every time I met with one of these teenagers, I was amazed by their ability to escape the chaos simply by drawing upon their drive to leave their home country. This capacity to take charge only comes after a child has resigned him or herself to the realities of abandonment and the feeling of having no one left in the world. These young men and women who feel that they can no longer count on anyone else—especially adults—how can we judge them when they were merely helpless witnesses to acts that destroyed their family, society, and mental well-being? How indeed can we hold a grudge against them for feeling abandoned?
And, for their part, how do they regain a sense of trust?

This boy’s story was thus too painful to recount, but is it necessary for those treating him to know every last detail? I don’t believe so. It is not easy to both respect someone’s wish not to share and still try to provide the necessary care, but it allows for a real change and real therapy. »

"A stony-faced teenager was brought in one day by his teacher because he was ’causing problems.’ ’They forced me to come here so that you could help me. It’s not worth it. I bet you want to know my story, and that I have to tell you why I am here, like I usually do. I am going to tell you and then you’ll leave me alone, okay?’
- Why is it always ‘always like that’ ?
- Of course they all want to know my story, afterwards they all look at me differently and I’m not interesting anymore. They don’t talk to me anymore about that. In any case, I’m warning you that I don’t want any pills. You can give me some, but I’m not going to take them.
- What makes you think I’m going to give you pills?
- Because doctors are always giving me pills.
- What would you have liked to have done for a living? Taken aback, he just stared at me…
- Lawyer.
- Why?
- To help people who have problems...

At the end of the session, he got another surprise: I asked him if he wanted to come back.
- Yes, I’d like that, unless it’s to get me to talk about my story.
- We’ll talk about whatever you want. What would you like to talk about?
- My anger!

So during the next session, we talked about his anger towards the hostel that had excluded him and what had happened to him when he came to France.
’In any case, in France, like it was back home, you don’t have the right to say no! You never have a choice, even if someone gives you one, it’s not a real choice.
We discussed his anger towards those who had said they wanted to help him but then let him down. His rage vis-à-vis the death of his parents and what had happened next… his neighbours that took him in only to make him work and treat him cruelly.

When he came into my office for the third session, he said that he had a question for me: why doesn’t the truth ever triumph in the end?

The following session he wanted to know why, sometimes, he had to hurt himself in order to feel alive?

During the eighth session, he still refused to speak about his story. However, this brilliant young man told me that he was feeling much better because he had found a place [speaking of Parcours d’Exil] that was “unlike anywhere else.” He knew that if one day he wanted to share his story that I would be there to listen; but even if he never wanted to talk about it, he knew I’d still be there for him.

I hope that once he finishes the ’schooling’ imposed upon him by the pragmatic system into which had been thrown— the structure only allows for a ’short’ education due to the limited time the system devotes to caring for each child— he will have the chance to pursue law school. I am sure that given the opportunity, he would succeed."