​Mental health services encompass a range of services that are meant to address anything from an isolated or a daily mental health challenge to long-standing mental illnesses. They include modalities like support groups, medication, therapy and many more. People who provide these services include social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists. These different services are often provided by different professionals. While psychotherapists are equipped to provide psychotherapy, most of them are not qualified to prescribe medication. Likewise, while psychiatrists are qualified to prescribe medication, most of them are not trained to provide psychotherapy.
Therapy also called psychotherapy or counseling, is a process of working with a licensed professional, in person or online, to identify and resolve the emotional, behavioral, and psychological problems someone has. Therapy offers people a safe space to talk about their difficult emotions and feelings, their mental health, and their painful life experiences like war, divorce, childhood trauma, abuse, death of a close person, and many more hard experiences that a person alone can’t deal with or heal from. Therapy can be used alone or combined with medication and other modalities.
Mental Health Services are for everybody, and they are a great tool that people can use at any point in their lives to help themselves find peace, function better, and heal from beliefs and ideas that cause them pain and fear.
Throughout several generations, Iraqis have been through many tragic events including wars, poverty, economic instability, threat of militias, homophobic and transphobic crimes. Some of these events might have ended but their effects and memories remain in people’s heads. All these negative memories cause people to be more violent, depressed, and suicidal. That’s why mental health services are extremely important as they give people a chance to process their negative experiences to understand why they behave in a certain way or feel a certain feeling.
Seeking services like therapy isn’t always going to be fun or easy. During your therapy sessions, you might experience feelings like anger or sadness. These feelings come back as you talk with your therapist about the painful emotions that you might have been hiding for long years. With that being said, you have to be able to distinguish between a good and a bad mental health professional. A good mental health professional will not make you feel sad or guilty intentionally rather they will walk with you through the painful details of a certain experience then give you tips on how to overcome it and heal from it. A toxic mental health professional, however, is going to blame you for the way you feel and try to change you. Keep in mind that not all mental health professionals are qualified as some of them could be licensed, well known, and have years of experience but still fail to understand their patients.
Some mental health professionals might cause you more pain by being judgmental or unethical. Having that experience with a person you think of as a supporter might give you a negative impression about mental health services in general. When a mental health professional is unqualified, they usually use their personal beliefs to judge their patient so if that therapist’s beliefs stand against homosexuality, they will for sure blame the patient for their sexuality, make them feel guilty, and try to change them. Our advice is to take some time to choose your therapist or psychiatrist and be careful with the personal details you share with them in your first few sessions.
Seeking mental health services could be quite expensive and even with that, Iraqis struggle with unqualified mental health professionals who get paid huge amounts of money. We are not stating that all Iraqi mental health professionals are unqualified but a certain percentage of LGBTQ+ Iraqis continue to struggle when looking for therapists and psychiatrists who know how to separate their religious beliefs and social views from their duty to be professional and helpful to their patients.
In 2020, IraQueer made a survey that included over 240 Iraqis from the LGBTQ+ community who come from different cities. Part of the survey covers the subject of mental health to know how many have sought mental health services and how their experience was. Some of the ones who visited psychiatrists or psychotherapists mentioned that they refused to visit a professional in the cities they live in so a person who lives in Najaf, for example, preferred to go to a service provider located in Baghdad rather than visiting one in Najaf. Visiting a service provider in the same city the LGBTQ+ individual lives in can put them in danger and bring troubles.
Noor is an Iraqi lesbian and one of the 240 Iraqis who filled our survey. She describes her experience by saying, “At some point in my life, I felt the need to visit a psychiatrist with my girlfriend so we chose one who was well known. We assumed he was going to be professional and supportive but things didn’t go well at all. During our session with him, he asked me to kiss my girlfriend in front of him and gave me hints that he wanted to have sex with me.”
“I only agreed to visit an Iraqi psychiatrist because I thought he was an LGBTQ+ ally. The psychiatrist wasn’t an ally neither as good as I expected him to be. I went to his clinic and as we were talking, he opened his cabinet, took out some pills, and advised me to use them. When I got home, I searched on Google for the ingredients, usage, and effects of these pills. It turned out they were used to cure homosexuals and turn them straight or as some like to call it “normal”, said a gay Iraq man.
Another guy was asked by his psychiatrist to visit him home and another who was advised to pray and read Quran to heal from homosexuality and become straight.
As an Iraqi LGBTQ+ person, have you ever had unpleasant experience with an Iraqi mental health professional? You can write your experience and send it to us to help us get a clear picture of the situation inside Iraq.
 

The situation for LGBTQ+ Iraqis inside Iraq
Not a single city in Iraq is safe for any LGBTQ+ Iraqi citizen. The fear of death haunts every lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender/transsexual person in the country.
While certain cities in Iraq, including Baghdad and the cities of the Kurdish region, are seen as less conservative, safer, and more liberal, deaths and arrests remain common everywhere in Iraq to prove to us that things can be quiet for a while but can get really bad in the blink of an eye.
The arrest of the individuals who were accused of being LGBTQ+ by the security forces on April 1st of this year is one example of the abuse the community faces inside the region.
Life isn’t any easier for LGBTQ+ Iraqis outside the region as Iraqis continue to ask IraQueer and other NGOs for shelter, mental support, financial support, and advice to flee to another country.
 
What’s going on in Lithuanian?
“The Lithuanian migrant camp that's “like a prison””, is an article written by Maëva Poulet that explains the situation and the miserable daily life that thousands of asylum seekers have been living for months inside the camps.
The article states that since the beginning of 2021, around 4,124 people have fled their home countries and entered Lithuania illegally and that almost half of them are from Iraq.
People who live in these camps aren’t receiving meals that fill their hunger and are forced to stay inside the dirty camps dealing with all the stress. The 28-year-old asylum seeker, Marc says, “They’re pushing people to go back voluntarily: when agents come into the center, it’s not to ask about our living conditions but to ask us, “Have you decided to go back to your country?” After this whole journey … It’s utterly frustrating.”
Abass, who’s an Iraqi gay asylum seeker, tells IraQueer about his own situation and the messy life he has since he arrived to the camps. Abass says, “I have been in Lithuania for five months so far. When others inside the camp knew I was gay, they started looking at me as if I was a monster. I was dealing with a lot of bullying and stress until I was moved, along with many others, to a camp that was supposed to be for LGBTQ+ people only and it had 45 individuals in it.
The problem wasn’t ever resolved because I, along with the rest of the LGBTQ+ Iraqi asylum seekers, are still dealing with a lot of bullying and homophobia inside a camp that was supposed to be accommodating LGBTQ+ people only.
It turned out that majority of the ones we have been sharing the camp with aren’t really from the LGBTQ+ community! These people applied for asylum as gays because they knew that getting their application approved was much easier like that since homosexuals are seen as a marginalized minority. The problem with these people is that they’re not only liars, but they are homophobes too and that means that I have to avoid them as much as possible.
Other than the mess inside the camp with these homophobes, the Lithuania government is not providing us with enough food and while the majority gets paid, we don’t get anything and we don’t even know why. Our applications, including mine, got rejected and when we asked about the reason they said that Iraq is a safe country for LGBTQ+ people so we all can go back there and live safely.”
 
The purpose of this blog
This blog is a small introduction to the report that IraQueer is currently working on. The main goal of the report is to tell the stories of the LGBTQ+ Iraqis who have been living inside these camps for months, to explain the current situation and danger that surrounds the community inside Iraq, and to clarify to the Lithuanian government that Iraq, until this moment, isn’t safe for LGBTQ+ people. IraQueer, with all its hard work to help the community members, is unable to fix the situation.