You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

My guest today, Yasser Abu Jame, is an experienced psychiatrist working in a place which poses unique and daunting mental health challenges.

The Gaza Strip is home to 2 million people.

The majority are young, impoverished and classed as long-term refugees.

They've been raised in a place of conflict where bomb blasts, insecurity and sudden death

have been constant facts of life.

Not only that, Gaza is a densely populated enclave cut off from the outside world by fortified

barriers. Israel and Egypt control access in and out for people and goods. It is, in short, a mental health pressure cooker,

and from time to time, the lid blows off. Anger, violence, despair, drug addiction, childhood trauma,

all are commonplace. But what can understaffed, under-resourced mental health professionals do to help?

Are the people of Gaza suffering extreme levels of mental illness or simply reacting normally to a uniquely

grim situation? Well, Yasser Abu Jami joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you. It's great to have you in our London studio. Your home is in Gaza. You work under the most intense pressure. I want to begin with a question about your own psyche rather than your patients. How does it feel to be out of Gaza? Well, it's lovely. Anyone who is leaving for a short trip or out of his place will be really nice. So what if you can't do it every day? What if it's very difficult to leave? What if you need a lot of things in order to manage to leave? So I'm really glad that I'm here. I'm really glad that I made it. I guess partly I'm thinking,

does it give you a different perspective on what life is like for the Gaza people when you can

look at it from outside? Well, the main issue is like you feel that you are free, you know,

you start feeling or enjoying freedom. When you are just in Gaza, you feel like being locked inside, you know,

like it's a big open-air prison by what it all means, you know.

So when you have the chance to leave just for a while or for a short period of time,

then you feel the freedom, actually.

And this is something that is not nice at all when you live in your own place,

in your own country, and you don't feel free inside. You are the director of the Gaza Community

Health Program. We think of Gaza. We think of what happens in the conflict. We count up the

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