The delivery of disaster mental health services must be culturally sensitive to be the most effective. We realize that Western psychology must be locally interpreted to be relevant or appropriate in many regions of the world. While other relief organizations seek to provide outside mental health service to survivors of disaster, it is PsyCorps’ mission to help regions prone to natural or man made disaster create and develop their own Psychological Support Teams (PST) with the belief that locals from a given culture are the most effective providers of psychological first aid services and psychological support within their own culture.
Our interest is to empower local regions towards setting up, developing and training culturally indigenous PST. Our objective is for this to be a collaborative effort especially as it relates to the cross-cultural applications of providing psychological support. Our goal is for PST to be set in place in a designated region, organized, prepared and ready for mobilization to address the psychosocial aspects emerging from disaster relief and reconstruction work, targeting survivors, first responders and caregivers. The process of PST development is based on a collaborative training model (CTM).
The underlying philosophical foundation of the CTM is a capacity building perspective that embraces a progressive cross-cultural insight and awareness. We assume that, as foreigners to a given culture, we cannot understand that culture well enough to render effective psychological first aid, but indigenous members of that culture can, if adequately prepared and trained.
Taking an ethnographic cultural approach promotes observation aimed at understanding a populace and finding common points of intersection for disaster mental health services. Efforts are made to minimize ethnocentrism (the tendency to use one’s own group’s standards as the standard when viewing other groups, to place one’s group at the top of a hierarchy and to rank all others as lower) in favor of the position that assumes no a priori evaluative stance with respect to differences; each varying cultural phenomenon is viewed in its own context, and described and interpreted relative to the cultural or ecological situation in which it occurs.
The primary principles of the CTM are:
- Embracing the local culture through flexibility and humility.
- Recognizing the difficulty for those outside a culture to understand the nuances of a given culture well enough to most effectively render psychological first aid.
- To seek to be more informed regarding the nuances of a given culture in order to bring to fruition a useful collaborative information exchange for the purpose of building up indigenous resources.
- Taking a phenomenological posture of bracketing off traditional Western philosophy and mental health idioms in pursuit of understanding local biopsychosocial attitudes and values.
- Forming a cultural coop that guides the process of PST development by integrating the following underlying strategies:
- Recognizing the primacy of culture-specific psychosocial values
- Developing a refined understanding of a given cultures’ ethnic, religious, and community diversity
- Collaborate on a critical appraisal of the psychosocial dimensions of a given cultures’ nuances
- Application of cross-cultural paradigms for effective real world generalization
- Seeking to establish relevant research designs to assess and measure the efficacy of culture-specific PST activity, delivery of psychological first aid and care for caregivers
To this end, integration of the CTM promotes the establishment of mutual collaboration with a designated cultural region from the very beginning of the process of developing PST.
- We proactively attempt to obtain indigenous input and incorporate a cultural perspective during the initial needs assessment from interested health care providers, individuals, local organizations and agencies, in order to make available a culturally sensitive understanding of the potential efficacy of disaster mental health services.
- Following the needs assessment, and with an established local prospectus in place to develop PST, we actively attempt to engage the principal individuals and/or groups involved in forming the team(s) to take the lead in the organization of the team, finding and identifying the team leaders and team volunteers, and defining the team’s characteristics towards the most effective cultural adaptations.
- Once the PST has been formed, we pursue a collaborative effort for the Team Development phase with an on-site round table workshop venue, focusing on further refining the organizational structure of the team by inviting and encouraging the local team leadership to participate in creating and setting in place the specific team directives and operational paradigms, for the most efficacious applications within the local cultural milieu.
- Finally, during the on-site Training phase, we incorporate the CTM to the fullest extent through inviting and encouraging the local PST leadership to actively participate in the workshop syllabus and training towards the goal of cultural specificity in the education of delivery systems for psychological first aid services and care for caregivers.
