In many psychosocial projects occurring in areas of armed conflict, local staff cooperate with ex-pat staff from western countries. Intervention offers the opportunity for local staff members to (anonymously) express their critical thoughts on the role, activities or ideas and attitudes of ex-pats.

Training counsellors, or psychosocial workers, in areas of armed conflict requires an explicit vision of the relationship between the educational methods used by the trainer, and the main messages of the training. This article describes the educational methods, subject matter and main messages of contact-oriented training of trainers for counsellors or psychosocial workers. The approach described herein is an interactive process in which the participants and the trainer become engaged in through personal contact. It is this contact that helps both parties develop their expertise.

In this article practical methods are described for the training of trainers who have the task to train teams implementing psychosocial and mental health interventions after wars, violence and natural disasters.

This article is about the growing interest in combining the traditionally separate objectives of poverty reduction and psychosocial support provision. It cites this development within the broader trends in the psychosocial field globally, and locally. It utilizes data from Sri Lanka to illustrate the interaction between psychosocial suffering and poverty in conflict zones. This article describes this new generation of interventions, implemented as combination projects, and explores the rationales and practices associated with them. It also illustrates the challenges inherent in such an approach through a case study.

The paper describes socio-cultural theories of interpretations of dreams among the population in central Mozambique. In general, dreams are considered a means of communication, conveying important messages that are applied to organize the social world. The prolonged civil war has impacted upon these dreaming systems by adding another dimension to the interpretation. War-related dreams do not serve as communication channels, but are experienced as striking repetitions of past events. In this way, the dreamer is forced to reconcile with his or her own history without the use of interventions that aim to block the realization of the dream in a waking state.

This paper documents and shares one experience of a therapeutic group facilitated for young children within the context of continuous trauma. It explores creative ways to work with children for whom, at an early age, experiences may have been overwhelming and their trust in the world around them has been threatened by external events.

This paper explores examples of unsolicited, culturally inappropriate and conflict insensitive interventions initiated by both local and international teams to Tsunami-affected populations in Sri Lanka. It also explores the apparently prevalent belief that psychosocial interventions can be delivered as ‘relief packages’ to those affected, and as part of project-based, rather than process-enabling, interventions. The need for an integrated approach to psychosocial intervention following disasters remains a challenge for humanitarian agencies and local authorities in post-disaster settings. Regulatory mechanisms for non-governmental organisation's (NGO's), charitable or individual groups, seeking to ‘intervene’ in the mental health and psychosocial sphere in the aftermath of disasters, are challenging the complex political, donor, humanitarian and resource-poor gradients. This discussion serves to highlight the significant task of balancing humanitarian compassion with effective psychosocial programming, especially in resource-poor contexts that seem to readily absorb such interventions.