My story

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Hello! My name is Daria Yurkevych. In 2019 I united professional and experienced psychotherapists with high standards and ethics and created a psychological space “Dakh” (meaning “roof” in Ukrainian).

Now Ukrainians are experiencing a collective traumatogenic experience. Psychological support is needed during this period, so with the beginning of the war, Dakh’s psychotherapists began to provide free crisis counseling for Ukrainians. This is extremely important today – to support, stabilize and add a sense of support in a critical situation. These consultations are conducted on a volunteer basis, we are a small private business that is not sponsored by anyone.

Our features:

• Each of our psychotherapists has been carefully selected. Only one of the 11 candidates got into the Roof team. All our psychotherapists have higher education, specialization in one or more psychotherapeutic areas, experience in their own psychotherapy and regular supervision. Each of them has years of previous experience – in psychological counseling, psychotherapy, coaching or psychiatry.
• We not only provide individual and group psychotherapy, psychodiagnostics and free crisis counseling, but also provide psychoeducation – we support people with knowledge through our social networks. For example, on our Instagram page you can find exercises for self-help in panic attacks, reducing emotional pain, reducing traumatic experiences, calming down while going crazy. We also constantly have a dialogue with our audience, we get a lot of feedback that it is supportive.
• We are Ukrainian-speaking. The ability to speak Ukrainian was one of the criteria for selection for the team. Not because I’m against other languages, I just wanted to support what is close to me. We can also work in English and Russian, some of us speak and provide psychotherapy in German and Polish, but Ukrainian is in the heart of each of us.
• Before the war, we worked with clients around the world – in Kyiv and Dnipro, Lviv and Chernivtsi, Prague and Warsaw. In person and online. Today we have focused our efforts on the Ukrainians who have suffered the most – we work online with Mariupol and Kharkiv, we receive people from Irpin and Gostomel. We take on the most difficult cases.

I created this space so that people could receive quality psychotherapy and be confident in the professionalism and ethics of the psychotherapist. Unfortunately, today, due to a great desire to help, volunteers without work experience and proper education help others, and then they need help themselves. Therefore, it is very important today to get a qualified help from people who know safety and have experience.

Most of the consultations we have held over the last month have been free. We are planning to continue individual work, as well as start forming psychological support groups. Psychotherapist and psychologist – two professions that are at the top in terms of emotional burnout. To prevent this process, and for us to last longer, psychological work must be paid. Our support will be relevant after the war because post-traumatic stress disorder does not develop during the traumatic event but after its completion.

By supporting Dakh psychological space, you are contributing to the mental health of Ukrainians.

Together we keep the psychological front!