Collective Trauma, Collective Healing ─ Promoting Community Resilience in the Aftermath of Disaster

Collective Trauma, Collective Healing is a guide for mental health professionals working in response to large-scale political violence or natural disaster. It provides a framework that practitioners can use to develop their own community based, collective approach to treating trauma and providing clinical services that are both culturally and contextually appropriate. Clinicians will come away from the book with a solid understanding of new roles that health and mental health professionals play in disasters—roles that encourage them to recognize and enhance the resilience and coping skills in families, organizations, and the community at large.

The book draws on experience working with survivors, their families, and communities in the Holocaust, postwar Kosovo, the Liberian civil wars, and post-9/11 lower Manhattan. It tracks the development of community programs and projects based on a family and community resilience approach, including those that enhance the collective capacities for narration and public conversation.

Jack Saul, Ph.D., is assistant professor of clinical population and family health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and director of the International Trauma Studies Program. As a psychologist he has created a number of programs for populations that have endured war, torture, and political violence in New York City, including the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, REFUGE (Refugee Resource Center), Theater Arts Against Political Violence, the Post 9/11 Downtown Community Resource Center, and African Refuge. He consults with organizations on staff welfare in response to trauma related work and has a private practice in Manhattan.