War, trauma, and bringing them all home (original) (raw)
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War, trauma, and recovery. Syllabus.
Increasingly healthcare professionals are being asked to assess and treat refugees, internally displaced people, trafficked victims, and migrants who have experienced traumatic events due to war and other forms of violence. Much of the assistance provided to survivors of wars and armed conflict is based on an unduly mechanistic and medicalized view of human experience that suggests that the pathological effects of war are found inside a person and that the person recovers as if from an illness. Drawing on a variety of genres, but with a focus on ethnography, we will analyze armed conflict, war, genocide, political violence, and migration as examples of social suffering. We will debate the social and political roots of disease and illness; the local intersection of the individual body, the community, and the state; survivor narratives of pain, loss, and trauma, and the ways that various public policies and interventions aimed at alleviating suffering can actually exacerbate it. We will also review the ethical and practical responsibilities of anthropologists and other social scientists as well as practitioners engaged in understanding and responding to different forms of human suffering. And last, but not least, we will analyze the training health care professionals-especially psychiatrists-receive and assess the applicability of such training to diverse populations of armed conflict and violence affected populations.
Promoting war trauma may not be a good idea
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Policymakers and practitioners should beware of inadequacies in the World Health Organisation’s recent assessment of mental health in conflict settings. While raising the profile of these issues, by universalising mental disorder classifications across cultures a simplified understanding might harm the roll-out of effective therapies, leading to the question: what would increased and scaled-up interventions actually achieve? Based on a paper in Anthropology Today, this is the first in a two-part series on the anthropology behind ‘trauma’ in war-affected and post-conflict settings.
This paper is about Orthodox perspectives on suffering with and serving US Combat veterans affected by PTSD and Moral Injury. The primary focus is on the healing found in the words of Saints Silouan the Athonite and Sophrony of Essex, their spiritual children, and others who were influenced directly by them (The Essex Voice). I do not do this out of a belief that I am skilled in this topic, but rather through my studies and work, I found I needed an introduction to St Silouan and what he can offer those whose lives have been affected by the last several decades of war. All mistakes are my own; forgive me.
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War becomes more devastating for the psychic world of the victims (interview)
Kalina Yordanova is a psychotherapist. She holds a MA degree in Clinical Psychology from Sofia University " St. Climent Ohridski " , a MA degree in Central and East-European Studies from UCL and a PhD in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology from UCL. In 2016, she joined Doctors without Borders (MSF). Kalina Yordanova works with victims of torture, domestic violence and trafficking in people. We live in times when the pain from the WWII is still with us. Yet, it seems we have not learnt our lessons and – despite our claims to be civilized creatures-we allow wars to rage. Why does this happen? Civilization and war are incompatible. Yet, one is not born " civilized " but learns to be such. Much earlier than that though, which is to say earlier than we learn how to live with other people according to some shared principles and laws, we possess one basic characteristic: ambivalence. Ambivalence is the tendency of every human being to love and hate the same object. This is why we hurt those we love. Ambivalence cannot be uprooted but we can become aware of it in order to control it. Yet, we refrain from such awareness because it means insights into our own cruelty and desire to use and abuse the others. The fact that the pain from the WWII is still with us does not necessarily mean learning from experience. Learning from experience means feeling responsible for the consequences of armed conflict and the condition of our planet as an interconnected system. This means an insight into the fact that everyone is responsible for both the reparation and the damaging of the world around. One explicit example of the absence of critical feedback about the way Western governments support the wars and even facilitate terrorism is their condemnation of the Islamic State along with large deals of high-tech weaponry between Great Britain and Saudi Arabia, for example. The lack of understanding of our own contribution to what is threatening us is visible also when a 9-year-old African boy is risking his life during a night hunt of endangered species and his prey reaches the table of an exquisite French restaurant for 100 EUR per meal. This state of affairs has a cost and everyone will have to pay a share. Sadly, once our reality testing is disrupted, it is difficult to restore it, because it is very convenient to project the evil onto an alleged enemy, thus adopting the feeling of having the right to act. It is true that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, but it is also true that facing our own responsibility for events in history means painful insights and the need to relinquish a comfortable life we have taken for granted. It seems that for contemporary people, it is almost impossible to give up on something desired, to postpone gratification and not to immediately act in order to meet their needs. How can people, societies and the world as a whole be healed in the aftermath of war? Is there some universal recipe or guidelines at least? Access to ambivalence, I think, is crucial for the healing process. From the perspective of participants in a global system of relationships, everyone must be aware of their own position in this system; 1 Bulgarian version available at