Promoting war trauma may not be a good idea

Policymakers and practitioners should beware of inadequacies in the World Health Organisation’s recent assessment of mental health in conflict settings. While raising the profile of these issues, by universalising mental disorder classifications across cultures a simplified understanding might harm the roll-out of effective therapies, leading to the question: what would increased and scaled-up interventions actually achieve? Based on a paper in Anthropology Today, this is the first in a two-part series on the anthropology behind ‘trauma’ in war-affected and post-conflict settings.