Four-year old Adila hid under a blanket and whimpered after the explosion. A young man had thrown a bomb into an open manhole outside her building a few minutes before I arrived. The police said the blast caused no injuries, but they didn't consider the damage to the mind of a child.
Adila soon forgot her fear and came to talk to me. "You know it doesn't do any good to lock your front door," she told me. "Because the terrorists can blow it open." It was a strange speech to hear from a curly-haired cherub: "If they come in my house, I'll get the pistol. This is where you shoot them - right here." She held her index finger to her temple.
Adila is luckier than tens of thousands of Algerians who have been physically as well as mentally maimed, like the little girl at the Zmirli Hospital whose fingers were cut off in the Bentalha massacre, or the woman on the psychiatric ward of Algiers' Mustapha Hospital who had both hands severed at the wrists in another attack.
Algerian psychiatrists and psychologists can no longer cope with demand for treatment caused by the 51/2-year-old civil war. The ferocity of the conflict and its targeting of civilians are destroying the psyche of a nation. "Not only will the consequences remain," Dr Ahmed Ait-Sidhoum, the president of the Algerian Society for Psychological Research says, "some people will pass the effects on to their children, and on to the third generation".
A woman psychologist told of a depressed young woman who is losing her sight from diabetes: "Fatima had been under the care of our department head for years," the psychologist said. "Because her parents neglected her, she transferred all her affection to him. When he was assassinated, she refused to be treated by anyone else. She was weeping when she came to pick up her medical records."
Dr Ait-Sidhoum says people react very differently to the war. "For some, its a generalised catastrophe that touches everyone, and they find it unbearable," he says. "Others see it as a series of isolated incidents; it's difficult, but for them life continues."
Those in greatest danger, or the most severely injured, are often the most resilient. For example, a woman who feigned death when her throat was slashed during a massacre recovered completely and has resumed work, although her entire family was killed. "Whatever the root cause," Dr Ait-Sidhoum adds, "a bombing, a threat, the loss of a loved one, the reaction is never identical."
When victims of violence cannot deal mentally with their experience, they often develop somatic pathologies - physical symptoms such as heart conditions, ovarian cysts in women, urinary infections in children. The school performance of children has deteriorated steadily with the violence. Children cannot concentrate, they suffer memory loss and are afraid to be away from their parents. "Some develop hallucinations," Dr Ait-Sidhoum says. "If they see an object that resembles a human being, for example a coat on a hook, they convince themselves it will kill them."
"In adults," Dr Ait-Sidhoum continues, "the tendencies already present are exacerbated. If someone had phobias or a persecution complex, these will be exaggerated to such an extent that he cannot go outside. In others it triggers traumatic neuroses - psychic disorders which you often see in wars and catastrophes. People constantly have images of what happened in their head, or they have nightmares about it, or cannot think of anything else. In some people it goes away with time; in others it stays. Ultimately, it is the psychological strength of a person that determines whether they get over it."