Interim Evaluation of Support to the Church of Sweden’s Community Based Psychosocial Support in Humanitarian Assistance 2006–2011

For over a decade1 humanitarian actors have recognised the psychological and social im- pact of an emergency or crisis. Traumatic events witnessed or experienced can cause mental distress and the disruption of the social fabric (through deaths, displacement and separation) aggravates this and any pre-existing mental health problems. The term psychosocial denotes the inter-connection between psychological and social processes and the continual interaction between the two with the one influencing the other. This term encompasses a range of understandings with at one end individual psychological pathology - acute mental illness, and at the other a holistic psychosocial analysis of household and community members, framed around the concept of wellbeing and its opposite - distress.