Instead, Jiang, a psychiatrist at Duke Medicine, has been following the events hundreds of miles away in China's Sichuan province.

There, parents grieve dead children, husbands and wives mourn the loss of their spouses, and millions are homeless after a devastating earthquake hit May 12.

Jiang is leading a team of four Chinese-Americans to Sichuan to provide victims with mental health care. The group, which leaves today for two weeks, is the first international mental health team to treat the earthquake victims, Jiang said.

The disaster left 70,000 dead, including many children in collapsed schools, and nearly 400,000 were injured.

"In a major disaster on this large scale, you can have 5 to 10 percent of the population with severe mental illness like PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder] or depression," Jiang said.

There are only 17,000 certified psychiatrists in a country of more than 1 billion people, so quake victims aren't able to get the psychiatric help they may need, she said.

While there, the team will provide psychiatric care to people in clinics and refugee camps, and they will train doctors. The team will also study residents' post-trauma mental states for research, she said.

"We want to learn about how accepting they are to Western-style therapy," she said.

Jiang was in China for work just 12 days before the quake and has been wanting to return ever since to offer her assistance.

"I know it was far away from my hometown, and I had no friends or relatives in the area ... but as I learned more, the more strongly I wanted to help out," she said.

At first it was hard to find volunteers willing to travel to the heart of the destruction. For one, the area still experiences daily aftershock tremors. And conditions are not good. Food and water are hard to come by in refugee camps, she said.

But eventually, Jiang found four: Glen Xiong, a psychiatrist from the University of California-Davis, Yin Song and Jian Chen, former president of Durham's Chinese-American Friendship Association.

Chen said he hopes the fact that team members are all Chinese will help them connect with people.

"We are from China," Chen said. "We know the culture; we know the traditions."

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