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Derek Summerfield

Publications and source records attributed to Derek Summerfield.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

Mental well-being in settings of 'complex emergency': an overview.

The mental state of people affected by war and other disasters has been a subject of special interest to academic researchers and practitioners in humanitarian assistance and public health for over two decades. The last decade in particular has seen a rise in the number of papers published in scholarly journals around the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) debate. Anthropologists have rarely engaged in this debate. Nevertheless, some of the most illuminating contributions have come from socio-medical anthropology (Last, 2000). This volume brings together a wide range of disciplines in the human sciences to address some of the key questions that bear upon the mental health and well-being of populations affected by war and displacement, with contributions from applied biosocial and medical anthropology (Almedom; Lewando-Hundt et al.); applied psychology/public health and social psychiatry (Carballo et al.; Snider et al.; Fullilove et al.); social work (Ahearn & Noble); and political sciences (Pupavac). The four themes that run through this set of papers (outlined below) remain topical areas of contention in contemporary humanitarianism. Scholars and practitioners in the biosocial sciences may wish to engage in the empirical study of human (if not humanitarian) responses to disaster focusing on questions as yet unanswered.

Altruism↗
PubMed2003

War, exile, moral knowledge and the limits of psychiatric understanding: a clinical case study of a Bosnian refugee in London.

BACKGROUND: This paper describes a Bosnian refugee, a survivor of war and ethnic cleansing, during a 3-year follow-up in a psychiatry clinic. DISCUSSION: This case throws light on the tension between medicotherapeutic and sociomoral ways of understanding the effects of such experiences, and of the limitations of morally and politically neutral psychiatric categories and technologies. Suffering always invokes questions of values: in this case the clinical picture represented a moral protest at what had been done with such impunity, and a refusal to accommodate to a world which now seemed unintelligible. The clinical picture also embodied the collective outrage, and sense of unfinished business, which many back in Bosnia itself were carrying in the wake of the 1995 Dayton peace accords which effectively legitimised the lines of ethnic cleansing. CONCLUSIONS: DSM or ICD diagnoses of depressive disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder turned out to lack validity and explanatory power. Claims that victims of war and atrocity typically have an unmet need for mental health services are overstated. Recovery from the effects of war may depend on reestablishing a sense of intelligibility, a task that must primarily go on in social space rather than mental space.

Bosnia and Herzegovina↗