Volunteers rebuild Sudan’s oldest psychiatric hospital destroyed by war

Khartoum, Sudan – Two years after they were displaced by civil war, Rafeeda Abubakr and her husband returned home to Khartoum, where they embarked on a challenging journey to rehabilitate their 21-year-old son from a drug addiction that had pushed him to seclusion and given him a bad temper.

Once a cheerful civil engineering student at the University of Sudan, Muaz had become withdrawn, sullen, and prone to sudden outbursts due to an addiction to “ice,” a methamphetamine variant that has spread rapidly across Sudan since the war began.

The family, originally from Shuqailab, a town roughly 90km (60 miles) south of central Khartoum, had fled to al-Duwaym in White Nile State when the war broke out between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on April 15, 2023.

It was there, in July 2024, that Muaz’s addiction became apparent. He had fallen in with a group of young men during the family’s displacement, and his drug use had spiralled out of control.

Amid the drastic humanitarian crisis that unfolded in the country since, and the near complete absence of medical care as hospitals were targeted and healthcare workers were driven into displacement, Muaz and other patients suffering psychiatric problems received no care.

When conditions in Khartoum stabilised enough to return, Rafeeda brought her son home and began looking for treatment. They found it only at the Al-Tijani Al-Mahi Hospital for Psychiatric and Neurological Diseases.

“We heard the hospital had reopened and launched an initiative for war patients, people with trauma and addiction,” Rafeeda told Al Jazeera. “Since November, we have been coming every two weeks. The treatment is free, and I can feel my son is improving a little. That has brought me some relief.”

The moment you step inside Al-Tijani Al-Mahi Hospital, the damage announces itself.

Medical equipment, beds, furniture, electrical cables and air conditioning units have all been stripped. Bullet casings and shell fragments are still visible to any visitor who walks the perimeter of a site that was once named after one of Sudan’s most celebrated psychiatrists.

Rehabilitation is moving slowly. The economic hardships that had been exacerbated by the war make speed impossible, and the needs are vast. But the team behind the War Patients Initiative works through it anyway, receiving cases and writing prescriptions from crumbling offices under the open sun.

Al-Tijani Al-Mahi was founded in 1971 and is among the oldest psychiatric facilities in Central and East Africa. By the time the war reached Omdurman, “it had been looted, its wards damaged, its equipment stolen, and its buildings left in a state of disrepair that the hospital estimates has caused losses now running into millions of dollars,” Dr Mai Mohamed Youssef, the hospital’s director, told Al Jazeera.

Patients waiting to receive treatment at the hospital following its reopening [Courtesy of Al-Tijani Hospital]

Rebuilding from scratch

In October 2024, Sudan’s Ministry of Health issued an order to demolish what remained of the buildings. Youssef, who had spent her entire career at Al-Tijani Al-Mahi since graduating from Omdurman Islamic University’s medical school in 1998, rejected the decision.

“We discussed it for days,” she said. “Then we decided to fight the decision.”

Together with some of her colleagues, she succeeded in reversing the demolition order. On July 13, 2025, Youssef returned to the hospital with a single colleague. The two decided to reopen the facility

Youssef had stayed in Omdurman throughout the fighting, hunkering down at her home in the Rabatab neighbourhood with her son and mother as shells flew around them. She described navigating her own psychological trauma through the decision to stay. That same determination shaped what came next.

Her first challenge was infrastructure. The hospital had no running water and no electricity. Staff set up solar panels to power basic operations and worked to establish a functioning pharmacy.

In the early weeks, there were no inpatient beds. Every case that required hospitalisation was transferred to al-Naw Hospital or the Military Medical Corps facility in Omdurman.

The outpatient clinic started with psychiatric consultations, prescriptions and referrals. Within a month, the volunteer medical team had grown from two to six doctors. It now stands at nine, including two consultants, all working within what the hospital calls its referral clinic.

Photos showing damage to one of the wards [Courtesy of Al-Tijani Hospital]

“The hospital currently receives between 60 and 70 patients daily, up from around 50 when it first reopened. Among the cases are children, women, and men suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and drug addiction.

“Most addiction cases involve ice or crystal meth, and the majority of patients are young people between 23 and 40 years old,” Youssef told Al Jazeera. “Many of them were displaced to neighbouring countries and returned to Sudan after the fighting eased,” she said. “They came back with addictions.”

One case that stayed with her was that of a man in his early thirties who attempted suicide after prolonged drug use. “It was a horrific and painful scene,” Youssef added.

According to the WHO Health Emergency Appeal published in January 2026, Sudan’s war has created one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises since fighting broke out in April 2023, with 33.7 million people now requiring urgent assistance. More than 9.3 million people are internally displaced and a further 4.3 million have fled to neighbouring countries.

The WHO notes that prolonged exposure to conflict, violence and instability has produced widespread psychological distress, with large numbers of people experiencing depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet, major gaps in mental health services leave most of those needs unmet.

An estimated 38 percent of health facilities nationwide are non-functional, and health partners reached less than half of their targeted population in 2025, underscoring what the agency describes as the urgent need to expand humanitarian access and sustain funding for life-saving assistance.

A stigma that war has begun to break

Youssef noted a shift that would have been difficult to imagine before the war. In Sudanese society, she said, “seeking psychiatric help had long carried a stigma, with many families turning instead to traditional healers or religious figures. That is changing,” she said.

“People have seen that going to sheikhs [Muslim clerics] and healers does not work,” she said. “There is no alternative now but to come to a psychiatrist.”

Dr Ghada al-Samani, who graduated from Imam al-Hadi University in Omdurman in 2020, joined the initiative after seeing an announcement on social media. She went directly to the hospital management to apply as a volunteer and has been working with the team treating psychiatric patients affected by the war since then.

Inpatient care remains suspended. The hospital has been rehabilitating its remaining wards and service facilities, and expects to be able to admit patients within three months. When that becomes possible, Youssef said the hospital intends to build to reach international standards, including a dedicated addiction research centre and separate units for depression and trauma treatment.

For now, the hospital runs on solar power, a small volunteer team, and the determination of a director who was still at her desk when the shelling started and came back when it stopped.

Rafeeda continues to bring Muaz for a visit once every two weeks.

This story was published in collaboration with Egab.