Counselling and psychotherapy in times of political violence

STUDENT EXPERIENCE GRANT
Grant awarded: £3178.40

The global rise of political violence renders it a key threat to public mental health, exerting profound psychological trauma on the targeted, oppressed individuals and communities as well as powerful emotional distress on the mass public who are exposed to news, reports and images of human suffering all over the world. The project addresses the pressing question of how counselling and psychotherapy training may better support the trainees in working with clients who are impacted by political violence either directly or indirectly. The project proposes two main objectives: a) to support counselling trainees to better understand and work with the impacts of political violence in the therapeutic setting; b) to inform future training and curriculum based on the learnings, experiences, and outcomes from this project. These aims will be achieved through a series of training workshops and practice process groups for students undertaking counselling programmes at Edinburgh. This training approach addresses the student experience of helplessness, professional anxiety, and felt incompetency on placement through enabling collective learning and processing and strengthening the institutional and community support in these challenging times.
This project directly addresses the collective trauma arising from political violence such as war, displacement, and crackdowns on political dissent, which have led to a significant increase in referrals for urgent counselling support. The project is embedded in the decolonial thinking that these psychological issues cannot be addressed through individualised, Eurocentric models of therapy that marginalize minority experiences and homogenize psychological needs. It also seeks to fill the current gap in the training curriculum which is yet to develop and incorporate a robust interdisciplinary training on responding to and working with political violence which we see on the rise globally.