HK: Our project looks at mental health in conflict. We carried it out in the occupied Palestinian territory. We understand mental health to be something that is not just medical, something that sits between your ears, but rather something that is social, economic and, importantly, political in the context of occupation, conflict and war. It’s a collaborative project with, as I said, Birzeit University who have worked in this area for many, many years.
WH: The project focusses more on research capacity building in mental health in conflict; we’ve also taken a bit of a broader view as to what capacity building entails. We began with a needs assessment that we conducted with different organisations working on mental health in Palestine to try to understand what their training needs are and where they see the biggest gaps are in their work and also what areas they feel are important for them. We did interviews with almost eighty people from thirty organisations working in the field of mental health and then based on that we co-developed a curriculum for an intensive course that we completed in July.
HK: Yes, and what was interesting is that besides doing the needs assessment we also looked at different curricula that already exist on mental health in conflict. What we noticed was that they’re quite generic, quite broad, very universal in a sense – one size fits all approach, and what we wanted to do was design something that is really relevant for the Palestinian context and for the wider region. So by designing the course we made sure to include material that focusses on the region, adapt the methods training to mental health in conflict in the occupied Palestinian territories, developed not just lectures but also group work to fit the context which is hugely important because what we want to, of course, build capacity on is to create locally relevant evidence and not just the one size fits all approaches that we know about until now.
WH: Yes. Also the way that we’re approaching the course is that it’s not a one-time thing but rather a training programme so we’re working with a cohort of about 28 people who also represent different organisations and are a mix of both practitioners and academics. We are going to be doing further training in the coming years. We’ve even had requests to play a closer mentoring role with some of these practitioners who are actually interested in doing research in mental health based on their own work. So we’re also playing the role of mentors in research in an informal way right now but that’s also something that we might actually build into the programme as we move forward.
HK: Yes and speaking about moving forward, next year we plan to develop an electronic and online learning module because what characterises, of course, the Palestinian territories is that not everyone can attend the courses, especially students from Gaza who are not permitted to actually come to the West Bank to attend a course on mental health in conflict. So in order to reach these populations, these practitioners, but also academic students we aim to develop this online course, an interactive one, but we will be facing challenges with that as well because of electricity and internet access that is a huge problem in Gaza, as we know. So it requires for us to be flexible, innovative but also be constantly mindful about the local situation on the ground.
How did the R4HC meeting help?
WH: The group as a whole is really important because it brings together key institutions and also key experts in the field who have many years of experience between them. It’s also an important opportunity to do work not only across countries but also across disciplines and that type of collaboration is really important. This is an important platform also for new ideas to come out and new collaborations also to form.
HK: Yes, I agree with this. It’s a fantastic opportunity to do networking, to develop, like we just said, projects across not only disciplines but also topics where we think about the nexus between, for instance, cancer and mental health. Of course there is an obvious link, especially when it comes to palliative care, for example, but these linkages are, until now, underexplored, not only in the region in which we are working but globally and to become forerunners in developing links between disciplines, between topics and thereby continue to be innovative.
Is there anything in particular you’d like to mention?
HK: We should talk just a little bit about the work that we do that I called recently research training on the job where we are creating a research project that brings together researchers from Birziet, King’s College, but also practitioners in the field to investigate the impact of uncertainty on mental health and wellbeing, so again merging the political with the social and the mental in various areas of the West Bank.
WH: That’s also something that we’ve included in the project as more of a research component but within that there is capacity building for researchers already working on the project and practitioners in research. There are different parts to this, so Nancy Tamimi and Susan Mitwalli are taking a lead on doing a thorough review of the literature on uncertainty. Then what we’ve also incorporated into the training programme is through the assignments that we’ve given the students they’re exploring uncertainty in terms of what it means, how it’s understood locally and then what the impact is on mental health. Then we’re planning on taking that further through other research activities in the coming years as well.
HK: Again, here it’s very important for us to have an interdisciplinary approach so there will be qualitative research into the meaning of mental health, uncertainty in relation to mental health, and then the development of survey tools in order then to conduct more quantitative statistical research followed, again, by qualitative research in order to get a really in depth understanding of these impacts on people’s lives.
