Something unusual in Thailand

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From Los Angeles Times

After a rare mass shooting in Thailand, something just as unusual: Therapy

BANGKOK, Thailand — When a soldier went on a shooting rampage at a mall in northeastern Thailand last month, Ponglert Supatwanich and his 17-year-old son survived by hiding in a post office for six hours. Though shaken in the aftermath, he did not think about seeing a therapist.

But help came to him, turning the 55-year-old hotel owner into a believer in mental health treatment in the Buddhist “land of smiles,” where experts say lingering stigmas around psychological treatment stop many from seeking professional help.

“In Thailand people don’t want to go to a psychologist. If you go, it means you are crazy,” he said in an interview weeks after the Feb. 8 rampage that left 29 people dead in and around the Terminal 21 mall in the city of Korat.

“We don’t express our feelings to each other.”

In their modern history, Thais have endured coups, violent street protests, army crackdowns and natural disasters. But the mall shooting was widely seen as unprecedented, an anomaly that forced national reflection. Authorities said a 31-year-old soldier, angered by a property deal gone awry, shot at least one person on a military base near Korat, raided a weapons depot and stole a Humvee, and then opened fire at a temple and the nearby shopping mall where he picked off fleeing shoppers.

Thai police and soldiers cornered him in a lower floor of the mall, shooting him dead several hours after the siege began.

Americans may have grown inured to the details of such attacks, but Thais were transfixed by images of candlelight vigils and emergency responders, by criticism of social media platforms after the shooter live-streamed parts of the attack, and by the failure of the political establishment to push for gun control reforms.

Once the media glare died down, a group of healthcare practitioners studying art therapy in Bangkok traveled to Korat to speak with survivors. They did not know what the response would be, but dozens of people showed up to the hastily assembled, two-day project in late February, where they sat for sessions, drew pictures and took part in therapeutic drum circles.

“First we thought people would say, ‘Oh it’s odd,’” said professor Bussakorn Binson, dean of the faculty of fine and applied arts at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, who helped organize the sessions. “But so many people came, we had to do double work.”

Bussakorn, an ethnomusicologist better known as Jane, has for several years collaborated with an Israeli professor, Rachel Lev-Wiesel of the University of Haifa, to organize arts therapy training courses and publish research. Next year, they plan to launch Thailand’s first graduate degree in creative art therapy at Chulalongkorn University.

Continues at

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-16/mass-shooting-thailand-therapy