Hoofdstuk 37 en onderdeel van Deel 6 Diagnostiek en behandeling van PTSS bij volwassenen.

IISBN 978 90 5898 121 9

Introduction

This article discusses the impact of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In particular, the authors discuss the relation between trauma and (dis)trust. Specifically, the issue of trust among the war-stricken people of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the focus of this article. It is hypothesized that war has exerted a clear impact on individual well-being. Next, war has had a clear impact on assigning meaning to life and the surrounding (social) world.

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.

The Impact of Event Scale (ES; M. J. Horowitz, N. Wilner, & W. Alvarez, 1979) is a worldwide-used self-report measure to assess the frequency of intrusive and avoidant phenomena after a variety of traumatic experiences. The purpose of this article is to assess the psychometric value of the Dutch version of the IES (D. Brom & R. J. Kleber, 1985) in several samples of individuals who had experienced various traumatic stressors. The reliability and structure of the IES were evaluated in 3 different samples (total N = 1.588).