On the International Day of Peace, we celebrate initiatives that strengthen communities and promote wellbeing. In post-conflict settings, mental health support is essential to both the individual and collective healing process, empowering communities to rebuild connections and create a safe space.
Conflict destroys so much more than infrastructure, livelihoods and human security. It reaches deep into the fabric of society, destroying link after link of this solid chain. With different ongoing conflicts, people continue to experience negative emotions of fear and insecurity, making it difficult for true emotional healing to take place. When feelings of hatred, fear and mistrust are not prevented, it becomes easy for them to spiral into deeper cycles of violence. By understanding this interconnection between conflict and emotional wellbeing, mental health interventions should simultaneously work towards conflict transformation. Communities and different cultures interpret the manifestations of trauma according to their own understandings of illness. In order to respect these interpretations, approaches that seek to improve mental health by working with, rather than against, these cultural beliefs need to be adopted.
That starts by recognising that instead of imposing different mental health programmes upon communities, communities themselves should have the capacity to develop and implement techniques aimed at addressing the effects of trauma. This could provide an alternative to western psychiatry methods that frame suffering as a scientific problem that needs solving without acknowledging traditional, cultural and religious aspects that may be pertinent to societal cultures. Although medical interventions have their uses, a greater emphasis on non-medical approaches can benefit traumatised individuals, families and communities.
In order for populations traumatised by years of repression and war to recover, they require feelings of safety, calm, empowerment, connectedness and hope. To help achieve this outcome, mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) programmes need to put more emphasis on the social aspects at both the individual and community level. Focusing efforts at the individual level would also negate inherent human resilience; that is why collective psychosocial interventions can go a long way in restoring damaged social fabric, especially when paired with economic development. It is very important to recognise how witnessing and experiencing violent conflict and its vast social, economic, and political consequences have a harmful effect on the wellbeing of, and the relationships among communities.
Any attempts to address mental health to achieve peace in a post-conflict setting must take these realities into consideration, working carefully to convey the relationships between institutions, diseases, treatments, social structures and the people they seek to assist. With careful planning, programmes can develop appropriate forms of structuration capable of reshaping biases in a way that creates new identities based on ideas of cooperation, forgiveness, peace and healing. If successful, these systems can lead to greater mental health and the transformation of conflict, bringing about changes in the individual, the communities and the context itself and restoring peace within and between individuals, communities and society.
