Modern day Bosnia suffers from widespread ethnic segregation, solidified by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the Bosnian war. This has resulted in a lack of intergroup contact and the deepening of ethnic divisions. Using the ‘contact hypothesis’ that was developed in the field of social psychology, this article highlights the need for intergroup contact as an essential element for reconciliation initiatives, and addresses challenges to intergroup contact in the Bosnian context.

Since 2007, the Centre for Refugee Rights (Australia) has provided workshops on community development and refugee rights to refugees from Myanmar (Burma). Described herein is one, five-day counselling training programme, which was one component of the workshops, developed for participants from community based refugee organisations who were living in New Delhi and in Aizawl, Mizoram. The author presents an approach to teaching counselling, both within a workshop format, and a refugee context.

While working for an international humanitarian organisation in the Sudanese refugee camps at the Chad border, British child psychiatrist Lynne Jones kept a personal diary. In this diary, she reflects on the practical challenges and moral dilemmas facing a mental health practitioner working in this difficult context.

Keywords: Chad, ethics, mental health care, people with severe mental disorders, Sudanese refugees

(In order to protect confidentiality, personal details of agencies, colleagues and patients have been altered.)

The author describes his experiences as a psychiatrist in East Sri Lanka where he was involved in building mental health and psychosocial services in the context of war and disaster He stresses the necessity of creating patient and family friendly services, and advocates for the principle of distributing basic services over the whole region, instead of providing a highly specialised service that most of the people who need help cannot reach.

This concluding paper of the Intervention Special Issue on integrating mental health care into health systems during and after complex emergencies summarises the main findings and conclusions of each of the programmes presented. This paper further integrates these findings into a common framework in order to extract key factors and recommendations on actions that can be taken, and those to avoid, to enable humanitarian emergencies to be transformed into opportunities in the psychosocial field.

The Iraq war, and the subsequent involvement of various stakeholders in the post conflict reconstruction of the health sector, presented an opportunity to learn about mental health policy development, challenges and obstacles within a post conflict context in 2003. This paper documents and explores mental health policy in post invasion Iraq, using qualitative methods and a health policyframework that analyses context, content and process.

In 2000 the nongovernmental organisation (NGO) HealthNet TPO started mental health and psychosocial support services in Burundi, a country that has been severely affected by civil war. Within a time frame of eight years, a wide range of mental health and psychosocial services were established, covering large parts of the country. During the programme period the NGO activities shifted from the delivery of direct services to capacity building activities aimed at embedding psychiatric services and psychosocial assistance within existing local health services and social systems.

The Spanish Cooperation, through the nongovernmental organisation Sanitary Religious Federation and the financing of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation conducted an assessment of the mental health care system in Equatorial Guinea in 2009. There was no specific mental health policy in place, and noformalised mental health care system. A National Mental Health Policy has recently been approved, and an implementation plan was made by the government and nongovernmental organisations.

In 2008, the local nongovernmental organisation TPO Uganda and the Uganda Ministry of Health began a project aimed of improving the availability of mental health services in three districts in Northern Uganda.

Archeologen hebben het fundament van de gaskamers van Sobibor teruggevonden. Ruim zeventig jaar na de afbraak van het vernietigingskamp moet de bodem vertellen hoe het eruit heeft gezien. Aan de oppervlakte staat niets meer.