Medewerkers van politie, brandweer, ambulance en Defensie maken tijdens hun werk soms heftige gebeurtenissen mee. Dit komen ze over het algemeen goed te boven, mede door de ondersteuning vanuit collega’s en de organisatie. Om die ondersteuning optimaal vorm te geven, is in opdracht van het ministerie van Veiligheid en Justitie de ‘Richtlijn psychosociale ondersteuning geüniformeerden’ ontwikkeld. Onlangs heeft Impact op verzoek de implementatie van deze richtlijn onderzocht.

Uit epidemiologisch onderzoek blijkt dat 6-8% van de kinderen en jongeren hallucinaties heeft. Zij zijn niet psychotisch, maar hebben wel vaak andere psychische stoornissen. Er is vrijwel niets bekend over de behandeling van deze hallucinaties. Beschreven wordt de behandeling van twee jongeren met hallucinaties. De belangrijkste behandelprincipes waren: bespreken van de betekenis van de hallucinaties, het niet meer vermijden, maar oproepen van de hallucinaties en het aanleren van copinggedrag. In beide gevallen speelden er meer problemen. Deze werden ook behandeld.

Cognitive theory, postulates that dysfunctional cognitions play a maintaining or even aetiological role in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In this study it was hypothesised that if distorted cognitions play a central role in OCD, there should be a relation between cognitive measures and the severity of the obsessive-compulsive symptoms in a childhood OCD sample. A group of 39 children and adolescents with a primary diagnosis OCD was measured on the CY-BOCS, and on the cognitive questionnaires the MTQ, and the CATS.

Prof. dr. Pier Prins is hoogleraar klinische kinder- en jeugdpsychologie aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam sinds 2003. In dit vraaggesprek blikt hij terug op zijn bewogen loopbaan en kijkt Prins vooruit naar zijn pensionering.

Armed conflicts and other humanitarian crises impact mental health and psychosocial wellbeing. In contexts of overwhelming need and overstretched government health systems, nongovernmental organisations may play important roles. In this paper, we reflect on the role of Nepali nongovernmental organisations in providing mental health and psychosocial support services.

The burden of mental health problems in (post)conflict low and middle income countries is substantial. Despite growing evidence for the effectiveness of selected mental health programmes in conflict affected low resource settings and growing policy support, actual uptake and implementation have been slow. A key direction for future research, and a new frontier within science and practice, is dissemination and implementation which directly addresses the transfer of evidence based, effective health care approaches from experimental settings into routine use.

In this article, we suggest guidelines that should be followed in order to create a culturally sensitive cognitive behavioural therapy among refugees and in global contexts more generally, so as to maximise efficacy and effectiveness. These guidelines can be followed to design culturally sensitive cognitive behavioural therapy studies, or what might be called ‘contextually sensitive cognitive behavioural therapy’, among refugees or other cultural groups in a given global location, and the guidelines can be used to evaluate such studies.

Mixed methods research, which combines elements of qualitative and quantitative research approaches, should be well suited to studying refugee mental health. However, this has not yet been adequately discussed nor demonstrated within the existing scientific literature. This paper aims to begin to fill this gap and describes how mixed methods have been used in refugee mental health research. Twenty-nine articles from the health and social sciences literature were systematically reviewed with a focus on study designs and key findings.