There’s no manual for this.

No chapter in a self-help book explains how to keep your heart beating when your entire world is trying to stop it. No therapist’s worksheet can prepare you for the sound of a shell landing down the street, for the ghost of a missing friend, for the specific, gutting sound of your own child crying from a hunger you can’t satisfy.

Yet this is the alarm clock for millions. In Palestine, in Israel, in Iran, and in so many other corners of our broken planet. This is what waking up means. Again. And again. And again.

While the world scrolls, or debates, or looks away—a mental health crisis is exploding in the silence between the bombs. This isn’t about politics. This is about people. This is about what happens to a soul when the ground is permanently pulled out from under it.

1. Survival Mode: When Your Nervous System Becomes the War Zone

War doesn’t just kill people. It kills safety. It kills predictability. It kills the simple, quiet trust that the world is a mostly okay place. When that vanishes, your mind and body don’t just get sad—they fundamentally break and rebuild themselves for a single purpose: making it to the next sunrise.

You stop sleeping. You stop feeling. You parent from a place of sheer terror, love through a wall of glass, and grieve in stolen, silent seconds. Your brain, brilliant and desperate, stops worrying about your feelings and goes all-in on threat detection. It’s not a choice. It’s a biological rewrite.

This is what that rewrite looks like:

· PTSD: We all know this one. The flashbacks. The nightmares. The single, sharp, catastrophic event that carves a hole in you. But that’s just the headline.

· C-PTSD (Complex PTSD): This is the quiet, chronic monster we don’t talk about enough. It’s not one bomb; it’s the thousandth day of hearing them. It’s a childhood where your first word isn’t “mama” but “duck.” It’s years of displacement, of chronic fear, of never, ever feeling safe. It doesn’t always look like a panic attack. Sometimes it looks like a person who can’t connect, who is filled with a bottomless shame for simply existing, who feels like a ghost in their own life. It’s so deep we often misdiagnose it as a personality disorder, missing the truth: this is what happens when trauma is the only home you’ve ever known.

· Depression: Here, depression isn’t sadness. It’s nothingness. It’s watching your child laugh and feeling… empty. It’s staring at your own hands and not recognizing the person they belong to. It’s the quiet, systematic deletion of hope.

· Anxiety: In a warzone, anxiety isn’t irrational. It’s the most rational thing in the world. Your body is screaming at you to run, but there’s nowhere to go. So the scream gets trapped inside, rattling your ribs, hijacking your heart, convincing you you’re dying even as you keep on living.

· Grief: There’s no time for funerals when death is a daily chore. Grief gets stuck, frozen inside you. You can’t process one loss before the next one hits. Closure isn’t just unavailable; it’s a cruel joke.

· Dissociation: This is the mind’s final escape hatch. You just… leave. You get foggy, distant, numb. Children are masters of this. They float away to somewhere safe inside their heads, and sometimes, parts of them never really come back.

· Suicidal Ideation: Let’s be brave enough to say it. When the agony is constant, the mind will naturally search for an off-ramp. It’s not always a desire to die. It’s a desperate need for the pain to stop. And in war, even this most human of cries is often silenced.

And the body keeps the score in the most brutal ways: Your body isn’t built for a forever-war.It breaks. Chronic pain with no source. Hearts that give out from the sheer strain of constant fear. Stomachs that revolt. Hormones that forget their jobs. Sleep that becomes a forgotten language.

And yet.

Through it all, people still find a way to be people. A mother finds a way to hum a lullaby. A teenager scribbles a love note. Someone shares their last piece of bread with a stranger.

Don’t you dare mistake this for resilience. This is not strength. This is a raw, animal refusal to vanish completely. It is endurance, because the alternative is unthinkable.

You cannot live like this without losing pieces of yourself. You lose your joy. You lose your memories. You lose your faith in a future.

But what truly shatters me isn’t just the bombs. It’s our indifference. Our comfortable, sanitized silence.

We’ve created a language to keep the horror at arm’s length. We say “unalived” instead of murdered. We say “grape” instead of raped. We say “caught in the crossfire” instead of butchered.

We’ve cushioned the brutality so we can consume it without choking. So we, safe behind our screens, can look without ever truly seeing.

I’ve seen the videos where a voice, shaking with dust and tears, begs: “Please, don’t scroll. Just watch.” And sometimes I do. Sometimes, I’m too weak, and I look away. I sit with the shame of that, because I think we all feel it. We scroll past the screams. We mute the bombs.

But the screams don’t stop. The bombs don’t stop. The children don’t stop dying.

This isn’t about who started it. It’s about who is left.

It’s about Israeli parents. Palestinian parents. Iranian students. Journalists with their cameras. Nurses in bombed-out hospitals. Their blood is the same color. Their dreams were just as vivid. Their lives were just as full.

Now, hospitals are rubble. Schools are mass graves. Fathers dig through concrete with their bare hands. Mothers’ bodies stop producing milk from sheer terror. Grief isn’t an event anymore—it’s the very air they breathe.

We are losing entire generations. We are losing lineages. There are children alive right now whose entire worldview will be built on fear, whose family trees will be known only through lists of the dead.

And the world? The world debates. It justifies. It scores points with body counts. It treats human suffering like a team sport.

But here is the only truth that matters: Every. Single. Soul. Counts.

You don’t have to agree with a government to weep for its people. You don’t have to choose a side to scream into the void: ENOUGH.

We don’t need more neutrality. We need more humanity.

Feel this. Don’t numb it. Witness it. Don’t look away. Say the hard words. Speak the raw, ugly, uncomfortable truth.

Because if we don’t, our silence becomes a weapon. It kills them twice.

And they deserve so much more than that.