ABSTRACT
The psychological consequences of the genocide are barely traceable in the narratives written by survivors of the Armenian genocide. While there may be only a small proportion of survivors who are known to mental health professions as the result of suffering acute mental distress, people who survived genocides are all at risk. A partial or complete somatization that can range from rheumatic or neurological pains and aches in various body areas to such psychosomatic diseases as peptic ulcers, colitis, respiratory and cardiovascular syndrome, and hypertension. More generally, however, latent anxieties arise because people are scared of being stigmatized or of seeming weak or emotionally unstable, and thus they have kept silence for year after year. Nowhere is the pain of this not happening more evident than in the following extract by a narrative from one of the Armenian children who survived the genocide and settled in America.
