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Child Mental Health, Psychosocial Well-Being and Resilience in Afghanistan: A Review and Future Directions

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Handbook of Resilience in Children of War

Abstract

The impact of war on child and adolescent mental health is an issue that sits high on the global public health agenda, especially where it concerns young people living in low-income countries (Patel, Flisher, Hetrick, & McGorry, 2007) and conflict zones (Morris, van Ommeren, Belfer, Saxena, & Saraceno, 2007). One key debate in the literature on ‘conflict and child health’ focuses on the relative importance of exposure to different kinds of violence (Panter-Brick, Goodman, Tol, & Eggerman, 2011): are mental health outcomes primarily driven by war-related trauma, family-level violence and/or structural barriers taking the form of institutional, social and economic stressors? Of course, a protracted war exacerbates poverty, weakens social institutions, drives poor health and often increases social and economic inequalities. But such a macro-level view of the consequences of war does not necessarily help to understand the everyday experiences, emotional lives and social realities of children in conflict zones. It is essential for research to carefully assess the main drivers of child and adolescent mental health, in order to understand which cluster of childhood adversities has the greatest impact, to reach specific insights that have both local and global significance and to underscore which interventions might be most effective.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Hafizullah Faiz, M.D., former mental health programme manager of HealthNet TPO in Afghanistan, and the staff members of HealthNet TPO’s mental health programme in Afghanistan; Ivan Komproe, Ph.D., from HealthNet TPO; Julian Smith, Eshaq Zakhizada and Najeeb Nuristani, from War Child Holland; and Michael Wessells, Ph.D., from Columbia University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Research and Development, HealthNet TPO, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter Ventevogel

  2. War Trauma Foundation, Diemen, The Netherlands

    Peter Ventevogel

  3. Research and Development Department, HealthNet TPO, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Mark J. D. Jordans & Bibiane van Mierlo

  4. Centre for Global Mental Health, London School of Hygiene and Hygiene, London, UK

    Mark J. D. Jordans

  5. MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Mark Eggerman

  6. Department of Anthropology & The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Catherine Panter-Brick

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  1. Peter Ventevogel
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  1. OISE, Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto, Bloor Street West 252, Toronto, M5S 1V6, Ontario, Canada

    Chandi Fernando

  2. OISE, Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto, Bloor Street West 252, Toronto, M5S 1V6, Ontario, Canada

    Michel Ferrari

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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Ventevogel, P., Jordans, M.J.D., Eggerman, M., van Mierlo, B., Panter-Brick, C. (2013). Child Mental Health, Psychosocial Well-Being and Resilience in Afghanistan: A Review and Future Directions. In: Fernando, C., Ferrari, M. (eds) Handbook of Resilience in Children of War. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6375-7_5

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