Collective Trauma, Collective Healing: Promoting Community Resilience in the Aftermath of Disaster

Collective Trauma, Collective Healing is a guide for mental health professionals working in response to large-scale political violence or natural disaster. It provides a framework that practitioners can use to develop their own community based, collective approach to treating trauma and providing clinical services that are both culturally and contextually appropriate. Clinicians will come away from the book with a solid understanding of new roles that health and mental health professionals play in disasters―roles that encourage them to recognize and enhance the resilience and coping skills in families, organizations, and the community at large.

The book draws on experience working with survivors, their families, and communities in the Holocaust, postwar Kosovo, the Liberian civil wars, and post-9/11 lower Manhattan. It tracks the development of community programs and projects based on a family and community resilience approach, including those that enhance the collective capacities for narration and public conversation.

Jack Saul, PhD, is the founding director of the International Trauma Studies Program (ITSP), a research and training institute based in New York City. ITSP is committed to enhancing the natural resilience and coping capacities in individuals, families, and communities that have endured and/or are threatened by traumatic events. He has served on the faculties of New York University School of Medicine – Department of Psychiatry, the New School for Social Research, Clinical Psychology Program, and Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health. As a psychologist and family therapist, he has created a number of clinical and community-based programs in NYC and abroad for populations that have endured disaster, war, torture, and political violence. He consults with international organizations and has a private practice in Manhattan.