What Mental Health Workers Without Borders
Members Do
Psychosocial
rehabilitation of severe mental illness
MHWWB members helped establish family and community based
systems for treatment and psychosocial rehabilitation of persons with serious
mental illnesses in several countries, including China, the Philippines, and
Pakistan. Work is underway on a similar project in East Africa.
MHWWB members have conducted Advanced Training
Institutes and brief workshops to provide training for physicians and other
mental health workers interested in establishing decentralized, community
based mental health projects. The most recent of these were in Jamaica in
Spring 2000, in Djakarta in
Spring 1999, and in Havana at the Fall 1998 General Congress of the Association
of Latin American Psychiatrists.
Providing
Psychosocial Assistance in the Wake of Natural and Man-Made Disasters
MHWWB members have played central roles in organizing
responses to the earthquake in Kobe, Japan and to the Pinatuba volcanic
eruption in the Philippines.
MWWWB members have prepared a manual (Coping
With Disaster: A Guidebook to Psychosocial Intervention) on
psychosocial interventions in response to natural and man-made disasters. The
manual is aimed at primary care health workers,
religious workers, and teachers, as well as at mental health workers such as
psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. It is intended for use in
situations in which there may not be extensive economic resources (e.g., poor
countries) or in which there may not be a highly developed mental health
infrastructure (e.g., rural regions).
MHWWB members have helped organize
psychosocial services for Kosovar Albanian refugees in the United States.
Mental
health and human rights
MHHWB members are helping develop an international
campaign for the human rights of the mentally ill. The campaign focuses on the
right to treatment and rehabilitation as well as on the right to humane
treatment in hospitals.
MHWWB consultants have served as consultants
to Health and Human Rights Info, a website that aims at making practical
information and materials on health and human rights more easily accessible to
health workers. The focus is on the psychological aspects of health and human
rights. Find it on the web at http://www.hhri.org.
Research
MHWWB members are developing a cross national study
of systems for providing social services to children and the elderly.
MHWWB members in several countries are organizing a
ten-site, multi-country project to compare relapse rates for persons with
schizophrenia treated in a variety of community and family based settings