The efficacy of a mental health program in Bosnia-Herzegovina: impact on coping and general health

The efficacy of a community-based psychosocial program in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war and immediate postwar years (1994-1999) was described in this article. Ten centers provided various kinds of psychological help in the besieged city of Sarajevo and the towns of Zenica, Travnik, and Vitez. Since 1994, an intensive monitoring system has documented data on clients, interventions, and outcomes. This study focused on the systematic evaluation of counseling interventions aimed to alleviate the distress in wartime.

Humiliation or Dignity: Regional Conflicts in the Global Village

Often regional conflicts are treated as if they are placed in a vacuum, independent of their environment. This paper attempts to put regional conflict regions into the perspective of a globalising world. It is suggested that feelings of humiliation play a central role in this process. Human rights ideals extend dignity to all humankind and prohibit humiliatingpeople as lesser beings. Human rights ideals thus define high goals and consequently create intense feelings of humiliation when violated.

Stress and coping in traumatised interpreters: a pilot study of refugee interpreters working for a humanitarian organiation

Twelve Kosovo-Albanian interpreters at the Danish Red Cross (DRC) asylum reception centre participated in an interview about their background and work. The majority had fled from the Serbian persecution in Kosovo, which involved living in a permanently hypervigilant stat, with intense fear of rape, ethnic suppression and civil war. All of the interpreters reported a heavy workload and a high level of distress. The most distressing part was interpreting at interviews for psychologists, where stories of torture, annihilation, persecution, and loss were told.

Working towards overcoming psychological consequences of oppression: an example from India

This article focuses on the psychological consequences ofoppression in the form f caste-based discrimination in India. These psychological consequences are described as processes in the minds of oppressed people, processes that are often unconscious.

Folk theatre improves psychosocial work in Kashmir

This article shows how a psychosocial project initiated by a Western, medical humanitarian organisation can connect with non-Western local traditions. In this case, the traditional folk theatre of the rural areas in Kashmir is used as a medium for psychoeducation.

Keywords: folk theatre, psycho-education, local tradition

 

Folk Theatre in Kashmir

Strengthening social fabric through narrative theatre

In this paper, Narrative Theatre is described as a means of strengthening the social fabric in dislocated communities. In the first part, we describe basic theoretical constructs underlying the social foundation of human functioning. The key elements are bonding and bridging as dynamic features of social fabric. This is followed by a brief discussion of the emancipatory roots of Narrative Theatre. In the third part, we give a conceptual framework based on deconstructing problem stories and reconstructing the emancipatory opportunities in the preferred stength-based story.

Youth clubs: psychosocial intervention with young refugees

The war informer Yugoslavia (1991-95) exposed hundreds ofthousands of children and adolescents to very intensive, often multiple traumatic experiences, followed by a chain f chronic and increasing problems in exile. This paper describes the theoretical framework, implementation and evaluation of Youth Clubs, a community-based psychosocial intervention implemented during the war years with the aim of supporting the psychosocial recovery and reintegration ofyoung refugees in Serbia.

Psychosocial interventions: some key issues facing practitioners

The ever-growing range of approaches to psychosocial intervention in areas of armed conflict reflects a wide diversity in underlying perspective. Practitioners are faced with questions of effectiveness and appropriateness of interventions. The author presents a conceptual framework formulated by the Pychosocial Working Group that offers a way of understanding psychosocial well being that embraces the breadth of the field..

The evaluation of mental health services in war: a case register in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Mental health programmes in war-stricken areas aim to offer immediate help to those who most need it. Usually, there is no urge to start a systematic registration on demographic data of clients and on characteristics of interventions. Nevertheless, there is a growing necessity to do so. Structured gathering of information can help professionals to obtain insight in the age, sex and number of clients they see, in the usefulness of the interventions they offer on the basis of which they can demonstrate the importance of their work..

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