This field report offers some examples of donor related, and management induced, stress among local humanitarian staff in northern Sri Lanka. These examples were identified during staff care interventions held with a dozen nongovernmental organisations in the region. In this report, the authors discuss approaches to staff care. They conclude that individual, stress management focussed training does not adequately answer the needs of staff members (partially) burdened by unnecessary, work related stress.

In order to increase access to mental health services in low and middle income countries, the World Health Organization has developed the mental health Gap Action Plan Intervention Guide (mhGAP-IG). This practical guide aims to assist non-specialised health workers in making clinical decisions for people with mental, neurological and substance use disorders. It is now a major challenge to get this guide implemented in all corners of the world. Therefore, this article provides an overview of different ways to convey the content of the guide to potential users.

Somaliland, in the Horn of Africa, declared independence from Somalia in 1991, but is yet to be internationally recognised as a sovereign state. The region has a significantly weak health sector, with poor service provision and scarce human resources for mental health, despite huge mental health need. Therefore, mental health care has been incorporated into an international health link (long term, mutually beneficial partnerships) between Kings College London and institutions in Somaliland, known as KTSP (Kings THET Somaliland Partnership).

In the past decade, evidence-based practice has led to a more critical approach towards professional practice in the humanitarian working field. Many agencies have increased their capacity and resources to research intervention effectiveness and programme impact. When evaluating psychosocial interventions, practitioners and researchers are often not only interested in intervention outcomes, but also in the external factors that influence effectiveness, the intervention process and the views of its beneficiaries.

A major feature of the Liberian conflict was the extensive use of children as soldiers. In 2003, by the end of the conflict, thousands of former child soldiers were in need of urgent economic empowerment, and social and psychological support. This paper examines the various methods employed inproviding support for these children by the relevant stakeholders. The study was carried out through field research, conducted in Liberia, which involved direct observation, interviews with various stakeholders and questionnaires administered to former child soldiers.

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

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.