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Trauma in Translation: The Case of Haiti for Global Mental Health
(Academic)
Deborah Jenson, Professor of Romance Studies and Global Health, Duke University
Following the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, Haiti raised the specter of epidemics of trauma-induced mental health problems, especially PTSD. This led to a host of interventions, ranging from unstructured visits by individual clinicians from the U.S. And other high-income countries, to small and large scale programs by on-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international governmental organizations (INGOs). These myriad, often temporary, approaches, and their typical reliance on a framework of imported Western psychological and psychiatric interventions, have inspired a range of critiques, which have similarly arisen after other traumatic crises in resource-poor global environments. In this talk, recent critiques of trauma interventions in Haiti's complex humanitarian emergency are filtered through a longer view of cultural "idioms of distress" and ethnopsychiatric theories in Haiti
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