A replica of the Clock Tower in Homs, which became the city’s most famous gathering point during anti-regime demonstrations in 2011. It was built by the Syrian residents of the Katsikas refugee camp, in Greece’s Epirus region. The clock is set to the time they entered the camp and a caption underneath it reads: “Time stopped when we came here” – September 2016 (Andres Barkil-Oteo/SyriaUntold)[This article is the outcome of a partnership between SyriaUntold and openDemocracy].
Five years in, with almost 5 million refugees outside Syria, 6.5 million internally displaced, and 450,000 deaths, the Syrian war is a humanitarian disaster of extraordinary proportions. In this current grim reality, why think about mental health services? Is it advisable to treat the severely ill first (the clinical approach), or to prioritize the strengthening of community ties (the population health approach)? In this essay a model based on opposition-linked self-organizing councils will be discussed as potential primary partner in fortifying mental health resiliency in the affected communities.
Holistic Approach
When planning mental health services, treating PTSD is what usually comes to mind; i.e., clinical approaches to clinical problems. However, this is a very narrow and limited vision, that many times leads to the over-pathologizing of social suffering.
