The ambiguities of social inclusion in mental health: learning from lived experience of serious mental illness in Ghana and the occupied Palestinian territory.

Purpose: Social inclusion of people living with serious mental illness is widely promoted. However, only limited consideration has been given to the meanings of social inclusion within different settings and the ways in which it is envisioned, negotiated, and practised. In this paper, we explore meanings and practises of social inclusion from the perspectives of people living with serious mental illness and their families in Ghana and Palestine and how this is shaped by differing political and socio-cultural contexts.

Fathers detained, contact restrained: Experiences of Palestinian children visiting their fathers in Israeli detention.

Background: Very little is known about the experiences of children of political prisoners internationally, because of the challenges of researching within politically oppressive contexts.

Objective: The aim of this secondary analysis was to explore and understand Palestinian children's experiences visiting their fathers in Israeli detention.

Participants, Setting And Methods: Qualitative data from sixteen in-depth interviews with thirty-one children were analyzed.

Well-being and pressures of daily life in two West Bank villages-Exploring context and history.

Interest in the well-being of people exposed to long-term violence and conflict has tended to focus on measurable effects of acute traumatic events, while attention to the pressures of their daily living context is relatively new. Using qualitative and quantitative data from a 2005 survey of all female family caretakers in 2 neighbouring Israeli-occupied West Bank villages (n = 820), we explored the associations of demographic, health-related and contextual factors with reported pressures and WHO-5 well-being index scores. The final model explained 17.

The Multi-Family Approach to facilitate a family support network for Palestinian parents of children with a disability: a descriptive study.

Background: Families with a child who has a disability have extra difficulties, particularly when services are hard to reach or less available. In a collaborative project, the Institute of Community and Public Health, the Palestinian community-based rehabilitation programme, and international non-governmental organisations cooperated to share and develop expertise and knowledge on increasing families' resilience through establishing family groups. This contribution focuses on the use of the Multi-Family Approach (MFA) in a Palestinian context.

Support groups for mothers of children with a handicap: a quantitative and qualitative study.

Background: Since 2013, the community-based rehabilitation programme in the north of the West Bank has established nineteen support groups for mothers following a Multi-Family Approach (MFA), with technical support from the Institute of Community and Public Health (Birzeit University) and the War Trauma Foundation (Netherlands). The main aims of the programme are to improve the wellbeing of mothers who have children with a handicap, to build support networks between vulnerable families, and to counter problems associated with social isolation and stigma. The MFA intervention is monitored and evaluated through an approach called outcome mapping.

Mental health, social distress and political oppression: the case of the occupied Palestinian territory.

This paper presents a brief history of Palestinian mental health care, a discussion of the current status of mental health and health services in the occupied Palestinian territory, and a critique of the biomedical Western-led discourse as it relates to the mental health needs of Palestinians. Medicalising distress and providing psychological therapies for Palestinians offer little in the way of alleviating the underlying causes of ongoing collective trauma. This paper emphasises the importance of separating clinical responses to mental illness from the public health response to mass political violation and distress.

Violence and adolescent mental health in the occupied Palestinian territory: a contextual approach.

During the past decade, the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University has focused on youth psychosocial mental health research with special attention given to protective factors and forms of resilience adopted by people coping with extraordinary and violent times. The authors take a critical view of the predominantly biomedical interventions adopted by humanitarian aid agencies and question the utility of therapeutic forms of interventions introduced by Western medicine. In a context of collective exposure to violence, individual healing methods based on one-to-one counselling generally have little effect.

Health as human security in the occupied Palestinian territory.

We describe the threats to survival, development, and wellbeing in the occupied Palestinian territory using human security as a framework. Palestinian security has deteriorated rapidly since 2000. More than 6000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, with more than 1300 killed in the Gaza Strip during 22 days of aerial and ground attacks ending in January, 2009.