FEATURE STORY — November/December 2005

 

His Story

As director of UIC’s International Center on Responses to Catastrophes, Dr. Stevan Weine has traveled around the world. He has visited places where walls are riddled with bullets and uniformed men carrying sub-machine guns stand guard on every corner. He has listened to hundreds of refugees, collected their stories and helped them cope with their experiences. And he has shared what he has learned in scholarly articles and books, such as “Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence.” But as he tells it, his work remains an ongoing project

By Lisa Stodder

Dr. Stevan Weine Photo by Lloyd DeGrane

One evening last fall, a deeply committed psychiatrist addressed a small audience at the North Lakeside Cultural Center in Chicago that had come to see an exhibition of photographs, words and objects created by 15 teenage refugees. The psychiatrist was Dr. Stevan Weine, director of UIC’s International Center on Responses to Catastrophes.

“Chicago is a city of refuge and being a city of refuge is an ongoing project,” Weine told his audience. “Starting a new life is an ongoing project.”

He then invited some of the teenagers who had contributed to the exhibition to read what they had written that summer. Abubaker, a teenager from Afghanistan, was the first to volunteer. Like many teenagers, he had been having a hard time sitting still, but when he got up to speak, what he had to say was not typical at all.

“It was a very dangerous, scary and sad time in Afghanistan,” read Abubaker.
He told the audience that his father, “a political man, was killed on a plane in 1996” and that he was nine when his father died.

He also told them about the time a bomb exploded in his backyard, injuring his leg. The family left to settle in Pakistan “but I never felt safe.” Abubaker ended with how he and his family arrived in the United States in 2002.

The rest of the story remains—in Weine’s words—an “ongoing project.”

Documenting the refugee experience
The exhibition was part of a summer art camp for Chicago teenage refugees known as HOMES—Houses of Memories and Expectations—and sponsored by ICORC. It represents one of the latest projects undertaken by Weine, and focuses on the refugee experience.

Since 1991, when he conducted the first studies to document the mental health consequences of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Weine has listened to hundreds of refugee stories.

Weine has become a “witnessing professional,” actively engaged in the field of mental health and human rights. Over the last decade, his work has taken him around the world, and gained him considerable attention nationally and internationally.

His work with refugees has created “global transnational relationships” and, consequently, he maintains a professional life not only in Chicago, but also in Bosnia and Kosovo.

From 1995 to 2003, Weine was co-director, along with Ivan Pavkovic, of the Project on Genocide, Psychiatry and Witnessing, a study that received financial support from the Illinois Department of Human Services. In 2003, he founded the International Center on Responses to Catastrophes.

Weine, who is both a researcher and a scholar, has written widely for numerous scientific journals and is the author of two books: When History is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Rutgers University Press, 1999) and Testimony after Catastrophe: Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence (Northwestern University Press, 2005). His latest book examines testimonies of those who survived political violence in Chile, Bosnia and Kosovo, and during the Holocaust. He applies the works of Russian literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin to show how these testimonies illuminate the consequences of violence and the hope they offer.

“Bakhtin said to me that stories are a way of understanding truth—that thinking about human development can be built around the idea of an open narrative,” explains Weine. “Bakhtin’s work helps us to posit a more humanistic way of working on those stories.” For example, Weine asks, “What are these stories that survivors tell? What [function do they perform] for them or for the listener? For me, these are the central questions.”

War and migration and his family
Migration and war are at the heart of Weine’s personal family history. His grandparents on both sides were Jewish migrants from Russia, Belarusse and Poland, who fled to the United States to escape the Pogroms.

“They came with all their brothers and sisters and parents by boat to Ellis Island and ended up in the Detroit area in the early 20th century,” says Weine.

Weine had an upper-middle class upbringing in the Detroit suburbs and attended integrated public schools. “I really enjoyed [being in those educational environments] and valued it,” he says.

His father was a dentist on the faculty at the University of Michigan; his mother was a teacher in the Detroit Public Schools who later taught English to Russian refugees. “About the same time I was getting involved with Bosnians, she was working with Russians,” Weine says. “I don’t think that’s accidental.”

Majoring in American studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Weine’s academic pursuits reflected his interdisciplinary interests. “I thought seriously about attending grad school for American history or American studies. I thought that I wanted to write books,” he says, “but I decided to go to medical school because I wanted to make a difference in people’s actual lives.”

Weine earned his M.D. in 1987 from Columbia University and did his residency in psychiatry at Yale University. During these years, he was influenced by two mentors: Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist famous for his studies on kids growing up in poverty, the civil rights movement and war; and Robert Jay Lifton, whose work examined human development and historical meaning among what he termed “psycho-historical dislocations.”

As Director of UIC’s International Center on Responses to Catastrophes, Dr. Stevan Weine’s work with refugees has taken him to war-torn regions such as Bosnia and Kosovo. Photos on illustrate some of the things Weine has seen: (left) a building severely damaged from armed conflict in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995, and (right) a family in Gjakova, Kosovo in 1999. Photos: Stevan Weine

Working with Bosnian refugees
In 1992, Weine became an assistant professor of psychiatry and director of the Traumatic Stress Clinic at Yale Psychiatric Institute. Initially, Weine thought he’d focus on urban community violence but “then the Bosnians came,” he recalls.

Weine remembers the day a refugee resettlement agency called him saying that Bosnian refugees were coming to the state of Connecticut and asking for help in addressing their mental health needs.

“It was a complete accident that Bosnians came into my life, but I was ready for it,” recounts Weine. “So I tried my best to help them and to learn from them.”

From 1992 to 1994, Weine served as director of the Bosnian Refugee Trauma Program at Yale, but it soon became clear that a large urban setting would provide him greater opportunities to develop his work. Chicago had a significant population of refugees, and by this time UIC’s faculty had heard of Weine’s work.

“The city of Chicago had refugees, but it also had a good infrastructure of mental health services in which I could work,” explains Weine. “I recognized that UIC was committed to the city and its people and real-life problems and challenges.”

In 1995, Weine joined UIC’s faculty and began to work in Chicago’s Bosnian community. He also began traveling to the regions of former Yugoslavia. He visited Bosnia in 1995, as part of a collaboration between UIC and the University of Sarajevo.

He was in Sarajevo just before the Dayton Peace Accords, and the city was still under siege, with combatants exchanging gunfire and launching rockets. “There was enormous fear but also some hope that it might soon be over,” says Weine.

In Chicago, the Bosnian mental health program at Heartland Alliance, a human-rights organization, was getting underway. UIC wanted to partner with a local agency to provide services for Bosnians.

“We provided clinical mental health services to the refugees, but we tried to do it in the most effective way possible,” explains Weine. “There were a lot of outreach activities, like home visits and talking with families.”

Taking new approaches
“One of the things that I learned was how limiting the perspective of a clinic is, and how we in the clinic needed to get out there and talk to families and teachers and imams and community activists and to determine the ways in which we could work together to help people,” says Weine.

“The traditional mental health approach might be called the waiting model, where you sit in the office and wait for them to come in,” he continues. “A lot of people don’t identify themselves as mental health patients, so you’ve got to decide how you’re going to reach out to them.”

In addition to administering medication and providing psychotherapy, Weine was interacting with Bosnians in their community, playing basketball with them and going to their parties.

“I recognized their vitality and resilience, which was represented to me in their sense of togetherness, and in the way that Bosnians hang together as a family,” says Weine. “Chicago has one of the better systems for providing mental health services for refugees,” he continues, “but the services are more or less based on American/Western notions of individual suffering and diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Yet many refugees, like Bosnians, define themselves more in terms of their family, and if they have a problem or a need, they seek help from within their family. I thought, why not bring families together in groups where they can supply mutual support to one another?”

In 1996, Weine began an oral history project, employing the idea of testimony. “Some people don’t want treatment but do have a story to tell,” he explains. “We created a space in which they could come and tell their stories, believing that it would help them to suffer less. But we allowed them to frame it as if they’re giving testimony.”

The stories were documented and studied as part of the Project on Genocide, Psychiatry and Witnessing.

Reinventing himself as a psychiatrist
That same year, Weine also sought the help of family scientist Suzanne Feetham, then in an endowed research position at UIC’s College of Nursing. She would have a critical influence on his work with families. Feetham, who is now director, Division of Clinical Quality, Bureau of Primary Health Care, U.S. Department of Health Resources and Services Administration, remembers the first time they met. “He was given my name as a family scientist who could help him frame his work as ‘research of families,” says Feetham. “The first thing he said to me was, ‘I want to reinvent myself as a psychiatrist.’

“The traditional psychiatric pathological model was not the most appropriate or effective way to work with these families.”

“In family therapy, you meet with one family or one family member, but the intervention he’s been testing and refining is multi-family groups,” she adds. “The focus of his work is building on family strengths.”

Multi-family groups had been used in the field of mental health and social services before but was under-utilized with refugees.

“It was a good way to bring together families that were feeling isolated, and have them share their experiences and exchange advice and emotional support,” says Weine.

With financial support from the National Institute of Mental Health, Weine and his collaborators launched CAFES (Coffee and Family Education and Support), a multi-family education and support group for Bosnian refugees in Chicago. The success of CAFES has allowed Weine to adapt the multiple family-based model for Kosovars in Chicago and Kosovo.

Earning the admiration of the Bosnian community
Weine has a knack for professional collaboration and making connections. Over the years, he’s learned how to approach others for help in order to take his work to the next level.

Mirsad Spahovic, a bilingual teacher at Roosevelt High School who came to the United States from Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1998, met Weine several years ago while working with World Relief, which had an after-school and summer school program for refugee children.

“At that time, Weine showed an interest in refugee children, especially Bosnians,” recalls Spahovic. “We’d meet twice a month. We’d sometimes play basketball or soccer with them.

“He spent a huge amount of time in the Bosnian community and I had a chance to see how he conducted his research. He approaches people on the same level,” says Spahovic. “There’s no question that today he’s one of the most admired persons in the Bosnian community.”

Establishing TAFES
After the Bosnians, the Kosovar refugees came. The Illinois Department of Human Services asked Weine to adapt CAFES for Kosovars. (CAFES inspired TAFES, or Tea and Family Education and Support, since Kosovars drink tea, not coffee.) Weine then decided he needed to visit Kosovo.

When he first went to Pristina in 1999, just two weeks after the liberation, Weine sought to make a connection with its mental health professionals.

“Kosovo was a country of two million people,” says Weine. “There were 19 psychiatrists and one psychologist and no social workers. There were enormous needs. Not only [for treating] chronically mentally ill people, but also [for those suffering from] war-related trauma. And there was no public system of mental health. Psychiatrists were overwhelmed.

“Ferid Agani was a leader in psychiatry and he was about my age. I remember moving through the crowd outside a neuropsychiatric hospital in Pristina. His office was surrounded by at least 100 chronically mentally ill patients trying to see him, because existing mental health services had been totally destroyed.”

Ferid Agani recalls his first meeting with Weine. “We introduced ourselves to each other. He said he had come here to help and to establish a relationship with local professionals interested in doing research. I said to him that was something we had been waiting for decades [to do]. For my generation of professionals, research was a dream.”

Weine helped Agani draft a plan of mental health reform, which became the official document for developing mental health services, and led to a policy change in the Ministry of Health. The plan, which received endorsements from the UN and WHO, called for the same kind of family-oriented and community-based approaches used in Chicago.

Weine’s ever-expanding work keeps taking him into new areas—lately, he’s begun to address the issue of HIV/AIDS in Kosovo and in other post-war societies such as Tajikistan.

“I think HOMES, Kosovo and Tajikistan are a good example of why have a center,” says Weine.

His life’s work
“I’ll always be working on a program of research [that focuses on] how to help families who have experienced political violence. That’s a life’s work,” comments Weine. “And I’ll always be involved in intellectual inquiry concerning survivors and their stories and human development among situations of catastrophe. What I don’t know, on any given day, is where the program will be. It could be in this country or another. I do know that I’m not the kind of person who can fly in and fly out. The relationships I have established are long-term ones.”

After three years of research, Weine has begun to write an ethnography of Bosnian teenagers.

“There’s a lot that isn’t finished in these experiences of political violence, which means that the memories of what happened long ago can always be changed by new experiences, new interpretations,” explains Weine. “To me, there’s hope in unfinalizability. Something that’s lost or forgotten can be retrieved and given new meaning. How are they going to work that out? That’s the question I’m dealing with in my next book.

“I consider it an enormous privilege to be able to sit and think and do intellectual work [on topics such as] Kosovo, refu-gee teenagers in Chicago and Tajikistan,” he concludes. “I also find it exciting to be active on the ground, making a difference in people’s lives and making a difference at a societal level.”