Psychiatre militaire affecté en poste isolé en Afrique, nous avons eu à répondre aux différentes demandes de soutien psychologique suite à un attentat. En raison de notre place d’interlocuteur privilégié et du fait de notre action inscrite dans la durée, nous avons dû faire face à un ensemble de problématiques collectives tant dans l’urgence qu’en différé. Le retentissement psychologique collectif d’une crise est habituellement peu accessible aux acteurs de soins, mais n’est pas sans conséquence en termes de santé mentale. Il nous interroge sur les limites de notre action.

Set up a psychological support cell for severe events became common. If the principle of ensuring a welcome function, listening and early management of involved witnesses and teams is unanimously shared, every situation needs to be rethinking case by case in accordance with the means mobilized, duration of intervention and integration of psychological support in the chain of rescue. This is what makes the whole point of feedback.

In this work, we report a situation where as a military psychiatrist assigned to an isolated post in Africa, we had to meet different psychological support demand following an attack. The originality of this story is related to that because of our privileged interlocutor place and our longtime duration of work, we had access to a set of collective problem both in emergency than after the crisis. We organize our work into three parts. We start with a review of the facts, then we describe our psychological support action insisting on the collective dimension of the crisis. Finally, we propose a discussion.

The question of the collective impact of the crisis seems rather little attention in the literature as it is usually inaccessible to the care givers, but is not without consequence. It raises questions about the limits of our action.