This field report describes the support and reconciliation work in a weekly multicultural and multilingual therapeutic group of African refugee women in a shelter in Johannesburg, South Africa. The problems of the participants, the therapeutic approach (which includes: team building exercises, guided imaginations, story telling, drawing, modelling and discussion) as well as the impact on the participants, are all discussed.

Keywords: reconciliation, support

We greatly welcome Williamson and Robinson’s paper (Intervention, this issue) on two counts. Given the specific goal of the Psychosocial Working Group (PWG) to promote debate leading towards practice development, we are delighted that one of our papers on conceptual and field implementation issues (Strang & Ager, 2003) is credited as a prompt to this thoughtful article. More importantly, we support the core contentions of their paper even if not, as discussed below, all details of their prescription for action.

Over the past 25years, humanitarian programming has increasingly included attention to the psychological and social impacts ofconflict. Over this time, a wide variety of approaches have been developed to address these ‘psychosocial’ issues. The authors argue that labelling these approaches, as a distinct and separate sector of activity is not helpful, either conceptually or programmatically.

Brief Eclectic Psychotherapy (BEP) is a manualized psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which has proven effective for police officers. This article reports on a randomized clinical trial using BEP to treat other types of PTSD patients recruited from an outpatient clinic. Twenty-four patients were randomly assigned to a treatment or a waitlist group. Assessment of PTSD was made before and after the treatment period (4 months). No significant differences between the groups were observed at pretest.