Forty-seven days have passed since the mass arrival of migrants in Ceuta, the Spanish autonomous city on the North African coast, a crisis that has upended daily life there and left residents in a constant state of alert.
The crisis began in late July and has since produced improvised refugee camps on the city's beaches, along with a deep sense of abandonment among local residents. Fear has become the word most commonly used to describe the mood in Ceuta.
Residents in the city's outlying neighborhoods describe public services on the verge of collapse. One resident, Carlos, said his 80-year-old father was assaulted in the street. Another, Marina, said she had stopped sending her three children to school because there was no extra security at the centers, telling reporters that their normal life had been taken from them and that she knew there would be no additional vigilance, so she decided to keep her child at home. Several families have gone further, temporarily sending their children to live in Málaga.
The radio programme La Linterna, hosted by Ángel Expósito, examined the toll on residents' mental health with neuropsychologist Aurora García Moreno, who warned of a severe psychological impact across the population of Ceuta. She said residents are experiencing a great deal of anxiety and stress, describing a state of constant hypervigilance driven by a feeling of being unprotected, abandoned and unsafe.
García Moreno said the survival mechanisms people are currently relying on make it impossible to gauge the true scale of the emotional damage. She said the real symptoms will appear once people begin to process and accept what is happening, or once the crisis has ended, and that this is when depressive states, anxiety disorders and even some suicidal ideation could emerge.
The mechanism of fear and hypervigilance
The neuropsychologist detailed the cognitive process that stops many residents from going outside normally. She explained that the brain, which she described as very clever, learns to link a place with distress, producing an anticipatory fear that inhibits people from wanting to leave home.
García Moreno also warned of the counterproductive effect of continued self-isolation. She said that when a person decides not to go out, they feel momentary relief, which reinforces the idea that danger lies outside and that staying home is necessary, and that the more a person avoids a situation, the larger that difficulty grows and the more powerful the fear becomes. She added that constant physical hypervigilance causes normal bodily sensations or disrupted sleep to heighten anxiety further.
Vulnerable minors and economic uncertainty
The crisis has hit unprotected groups especially hard, including unaccompanied minors who arrive after living through extreme situations in their countries of origin. García Moreno said these young people are exposed to all kinds of violence, social rejection and discrimination, stressing the particular risk of sexual assault and exploitation faced by girls, as well as the lasting effects of growing up without an attachment figure.
The social tension has compounded damage to local business. Small business owners, among them a man named Nacho, reported sales drops of between 41% and 70% after being forced into temporary closures. Various sectors have responded by hiring private security guards to protect their day-to-day operations amid the uncertainty over how the crisis will be stabilised.
Psychological intervention and future resilience
García Moreno said it was essential to provide immediate psychological support both for residents and for frontline professionals who are overwhelmed by the situation. She called for psychoeducational guidance to be made available to families to help them manage their fear.
Overcoming this collective trauma, she said, does not mean forgetting what happened, but rather assimilating the change and strengthening resilience. She concluded that recovery should be understood as accepting that life can change, stressing the importance of integrating the experience so that suffering does not come to dominate the mental health of the people of Ceuta.
