Elisa van Ee’s dissertation A New Generation: How refugee trauma affects parenting and child development is well written, important and interesting to read. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between the traumatization of refugee parents and the impact traumatization has on their non-traumatized children.

Van Ee is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist affiliated with Centrum 45, the Dutch national institute for specialist diagnostics and treatment of psycho-trauma resulting from persecution, war and violence.

There is little evidence as to which kind of psychotherapy is the most effective in the treatment of traumatised refugees. At the Competence Center for Transcultural Psychiatry, a series of clinical trials have been conducted since 2008. The first results are pending publication. The aim of this paper is to discuss some of the challenges in adapting Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to the treatment of traumatised refugees, as well as describe a randomised clinical trial designed to test two such adaptations.

Background: Existing studies of mental health interventions in low-resource settings have employed highly structured interventions delivered by non-professionals that typically do not vary by client. Given high comorbidity among mental health problems and implementation challenges with scaling up multiple structured evidence-based treatments (EBTs), a transdiagnostic treatment could provide an additional option for approaching community-based treatment of mental health problems.

Objective: Concept mapping is a method for developing a conceptual framework of a
complex topic for use as a guide to evaluation or planning. In concept mapping, thoughts
and ideas are represented in the form of a picture or map, the content of which is determined
by a group of stakeholders. This study aimed to explore the suitability of this
method as a tool to integrate practical knowledge with scientific knowledge in order to
improve theory development as a sound basis for practical decision-making.