Taking mental health into account at Action Against Hunger

A whole set of reasons has converged to the question of taking care of traumatised beneficiaries : questioning from the field concerning the limits of our approach, the headquarters’ intention to improve the quality of our services, the experience of psycho-social programmes carried out by different NGOs in Eastern Europe, and ethical questioning regarding the beneficiaries’ needs at a psychological level.

The idea of a pilot project has grown with the aim of defining propositions dealing with
mental health in the Action contre la Faim programmes and based on the following elements :

• Situations in which Action contre la Faim intervene are often crisis situations, that of social destruction and/or of political and/or physical violence, which obviously have an impact on the mental health of the beneficiaries, the national teams and the expatriates. This may disrupt the daily life and entail the loss of reference points. How can Action contre la Faim take into account this aspect in their daily work?
• The beneficiaries have often gone through or been witnesses of acts of violence, of physical and/or social violence, have had to abandon their homes and their land, do not know what has happened to members of their families… What responses can Action contre la Faim bring faced with this psychological suffering? How can we still improve the services proposed in emergency situations as well as in post-emergency or in more chronic situations?
• In particular how can we avoid that the time spent in the nutrition centres does not have an additional traumatic effect on people who are already very vulnerable?
• How can we try to prevent the medium and long-term psychological effects of the traumas encountered?