This article describes a therapeutic framing course suitable for traumatised adolescent refugees, aimed at coping with nightmares. The training connects directly with the complaints and symptoms of these refugees. As a result they feel less helpless. Sometimes this training becomes a point of departure for therapy during which traumatic experiences are discussed.

Keywords: adolescents, unaccompanied minors, PTSD

The problems of adolescent refugees in a western country

Traumatized refugees arrive in a new country exhausted, depleted and disoriented. Moreover, they have to face many new challenges such as getting legal residency, learning a new language and the ways of a new culture, finding housing, employment, etc:. With all these burdens, most parents have little solace to offer their children,, children who are also uprooted and overwhelmed.

This paper describes the conceptual framework and application of a working model (‘EPSoCare) for psychosocial interventionfor refugees living in camps in low income countries. The intervention's main objective is social re-integration of individuals with psychosocial problems. The model was applied in pilot programmes in camps with survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The interventions aimed to cover 360.000 refugees in camps in Tanzania, and 230.000 in a camp in Zaire.

Some critical notes on Anica Mikus Kos & Vahida Huzejrovic: Volunteers as helpers in war-related distress.

In this journal, Anica Mikus Kos & Vahida Huzejrovic (Intervention, 2003, Vol. 1 (2) pp. 50-56) recently described the role volunteers can play as helpers in war-related distress. They base their description on their experiences in this field during the recent Balkan war in former Yugoslavia.