ALGERIA HAS BECOME AN OPEN-AIR PSYCHIATRIC ASYLUM!
In Algeria, the issue of mental health remains a subject carefully stifled by the military regime, as if acknowledging the scale of the psychological disaster would amount to admitting the total failure of a system in power for more than sixty years. Yet the figures exist, the reports do as well, and they paint a damning picture: Algeria is today paying the human and psychological price of a regime built on violence, fear, permanent manipulation, ideological indoctrination, and hatred toward Morocco.
From the 1990s onward, the “black decade,” the direct result of political and security collapse orchestrated by the circles of power, plunged Algerian society into massive collective trauma. Massacres, terrorism, disappearances, extreme violence: this period was never truly dealt with, neither on the judicial level nor on the psychological one. The regime chose instead to impose amnesia, leaving millions of citizens alone with their wounds.
An internal document from the Algerian Ministry of Health, classified confidential in 2018, nevertheless acknowledged that mental disorders represent one of the country’s major challenges, going so far as to become the leading cause of functional disability. The same document established a direct link between the explosion of psychiatric pathologies and unresolved historical traumas, from the civil war of the 1990s to the even older scars of the war of independence, and the sense of inferiority toward Morocco, constantly instrumentalized by the mafia-like power of the Generals.
The data are unequivocal: massive post-traumatic stress, chronic depression, generalized anxiety disorders, addictions, schizophrenia. In the absence of a genuine national system of care or hospital internment, the regime has allowed a society under permanent pressure to take root, fed by fear, hatred, frustration, and an official discourse based on external conspiracy and victimhood.
Worse still, instead of treating these clinical symptoms, the Algerian authorities have chosen to push forward blindly: ideological indoctrination, the obsessive designation of enemies, and the pathological instrumentalization of hatred toward Morocco, used as a political outlet to divert attention from internal failures.
This toxic strategy has turned propaganda into a collective anesthetic, blocking any calm debate, any national self-examination, any social healing. Internet shutdowns, censorship, repression and the militarization of public speech only worsen an already explosive situation.
Foreign specialists are sounding the alarm: without recognition of the collective trauma and without a break with authoritarian governance, Algeria is sinking into a silent psychological crisis that directly threatens the country’s social stability.
The danger is not the Algerian people. The danger is a regime that refuses to free them, to calm them, and to heal them.
Translated from Abderrazzak Boussaid’s French article – le7tv
