A mobile psychological assistance center from the Maltese Relief Service has been opened in Stryiskyi Park. It provides individual consultations with adult and child psychologists, art and play therapies for children, as well as other developmental activities. The center is open on weekdays from 9 am to 6 pm at Ulas Samchuk Street 14 (the main alley of Stryiskyi Park).
First of all, the center provides psychological assistance to internally displaced people, which is why it is located next to the shelter and modular town for IDPs. The mobile center for psychological assistance has been working in test mode for a month. During this time, it was visited by around 450 children from displaced families, with whom psychologists of the Maltese Relief Service conducted various types of therapy.
“People who left the area of active hostilities and had to leave their homes are experiencing great stress. And while adults can mostly seek help from psychologists on their own, it is more difficult with children. To help children, we have re-equipped one of the rooms for play therapy. The whole room is filled with toys that we use as symbolic objects to interact with the child through play. The purpose of such therapy is to reduce the impact of war traumas, find resources, reduce stress, give more stability to the mental state, adapt to new conditions, and integrate more easily into the new environment,” says Olena Romanova, psychologist of the Maltese Relief Service.
In addition, the mobile center of psychological assistance provides music and art therapy for children, individual consultations, educational classes (in particular, chess), and animators’ work with children. The Center is open for IDPs and residents of the city on weekdays from 9 am to 6 pm at Ulas Samchuk Street 14 (the main alley of Stryiskyi Park).
It should be noted that the Maltese Relief Service has been providing psychological assistance to people affected by the war since 2014. “We expanded the work of our psychological team with the beginning of the full-scale war in February. Since then, our specialists have provided 13,300 psychological consultations in Ukraine. We are talking about both group and individual consultations. Our psychologists work in shelters, transit centers for IDPs and refugees, inclusive centers for children, hospitals with people who lost limbs because of the war, and schoolteachers,” says Pavlo Titko, Head of the Maltese Relief Service.
In the East of Ukraine, most of these centers of psychological assistance are now destroyed. Our centers do not work in occupied Mariupol and Severodonetsk and are destroyed in Hirske, Pokrovsk, and in Kramatorsk due to constant shelling.
