Surviving Torture

by Richard Mollica, MD. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 351;1. July 1, 2004. www.nejm.org

Excerpt

“[T]he effective care of torture survivors must begin with awareness. Identifying a patient who has been tortured is not like finding a needle in a haystack. Many characteristics of the patient’s background provide clues that torture may have occurred. It is estimated, for example, that 60 percent of persons who seek asylum in the United States have been tortured, as have many refugees and migrant workers. A history of torture is common in various groups that have resettled here during recent decades — for example, Cambodians and Vietnamese “boat people” and former Vietnamese prisoners of war who arrived in the 1980s, Central Americans who immigrated in the 1980s and 1990s, and recent arrivals from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Many newcomers enter the United States not only to find economic opportunity, but also to escape violence at home.”