Psychologists warn of public mental health situation

Psychologist Ana Mirkovic warned that the nation has not recovered from last year’s mass killings at the Ribnikar elementary school in Belgrade and two villages outside the town of Mladenovac. “After Ribnikar we thought things couldn’t get worse and it was the rock bottom and then the two villages happened. It think we haven’t recovered from that yet,” she said.

Tanja Bokun from the Srce Center which operates a mental health help line said they were flooded. “People are upset by what they heard and saw, especially the people who lost someone close in the tragedy. There were cases of people who took part in the rescue calling us,” she said.

The psychologists said the public feels helpless because of a feeling that the state is putting their lives in danger. They said the authorities have been pushing stories of the country as an economic tiger, construction underway and the envy of the world and then it turns out that someone’s error caused the deaths of 14 people.

The situation is so bad that the Serbian Psychological Society decided to form a team of experts to tackle the problem. “Things should not be swept under the carpet in this situation. We have to be in contact without our thoughts and feelings and not take any bad decisions,” the Society’s Aleksandar Stevanovic told N1.