[custom_adv] “The brain does not forget.” Those were the words of one doctor when talking about the August 4 Beirut port explosion. [custom_adv] One month on, Lebanese are still reeling from the blast caused by a fire that ignited 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored at the port. People are still putting lives and homes back together, and on Friday, the search still continued for survivors. In a country accustomed to war and violence, Lebanese are now trying to cope with a new kind of emotional trauma. [custom_adv] The explosion is largely regarded as the result of government negligence, where subsequent governments knew that the chemical substance had been stored at the port since 2014, and a paper trail shows that all who knew failed to act. [custom_adv] Dr. Georges Karam, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology at Saint George Hospital, was in the Gemmayze neighborhood near the port when the ammonium nitrate exploded, shaking Beirut to its core. The blast, felt in Cyprus some 200 km away, killed 191 people, injured over 6,500, and left tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands, of people homeless. [custom_adv] Just like 30 years were not enough for Karam to overcome his own trauma from the Lebanese Civil War that lasted 15 years, ending in 1990, Karam fears no amount of time will allow Lebanese to forget the events of August 4. The blasts, for Karam, triggered his own troubled relationship with the war and resurfaced nightmares. [custom_adv] In partnership with the Institute for Development, Research, Advocacy and Applied Care (IDRAAC), the first non-governmental organization dedicated to mental health in Lebanon, the Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology at Saint George Hospital launched a free walk-in mental health clinic. [custom_adv] Many patients were treated hastily in the blast’s immediate aftermath. As hospitals were overwhelmed, hospitals, parking lots and streets turned to operating areas as bloodied people staggered in and exhausted healthcare personnel worked relentlessly to save as many lives as possible, while simultaneously processing their own trauma. [custom_adv] More than half of the hospitals in Beirut were damaged, and emergency rooms, operating rooms, and intensive care units were at full capacity just moments after the blast. Outside one hospital, doctors treated patients in the street as the hospital lost electricity. A newborn, baby George, was even delivered with the aid of cell phone light. [custom_adv] Today, third year digestive surgery resident Dr. Christian Mouawad tells us that these floors and units at Saint Joseph Hospital in Dora, a suburb just 7 minutes away from Beirut port, and Hôtel-Dieu de France University Hospital in Achrafieh, one of the oldest neighborhoods east of Beirut, are almost empty of blast victims, and that the hospitals have cleared the material damages.