Public Health, Mental Health, and Mass Atrocity Prevention

This multidisciplinary volume considers the role of both public health and mental health policies and practices in the prevention of mass atrocity, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

The authors address atrocity prevention through the framework of primary (pre-conflict), secondary (mid-conflict), and tertiary (post-conflict) settings. They examine the ways in which public health and mental health scholars and practitioners currently orient their research and interventions and the ways in which we can adapt frameworks, methods, tools, and practice toward a more sophisticated and truly interdisciplinary understanding and application of atrocity prevention. The book brings together diverse fields of study by global north and global south authors in diverse contexts. It culminates in a narrative that demonstrates the state of the current fields on intersecting themes within public health, mental health, and mass atrocity prevention and the future potential directions in which these intersections could go. Such discussions will serve to influence both policy makers and practitioners in these fields toward developing, adapting, and testing frames and tools for atrocity prevention. Multidisciplinary perspectives are represented among editors and authors, including law, political science, international studies, public health, mental health, philosophy, clinical psychology, social psychology, history, and peace studies.

Part I:Linking Concepts of Public Health, Mental Health, and Mass Atrocity Prevention

Chapter 1: (Re)Conceptualizing Atrocity Crimes as Public Health Catastrophes

Chapter 2: Supporting Mental Health in Conflict-Affected Settings: Effectiveness, Innovation, and Contemporary Challenges

Chapter 3: Does it Feel like Justice to You?

Part II: Supporting Mental and Public Health Prevention Work in Pre-Atrocity, Atrocity, and Post-Atrocity Settings

Chapter 4: Over-Policed and Under Protected: Police Violence as a Symptom and Cause of Urban Violence in America’s Black Communities

Chapter 5: Hatred Against Roma in Times of Pandemic

Chapter 6: A Public Health Practice with an Integrated Psychosocial Approach:Care Workers Serving Victims of Human Rights Violations in Ecuador

Part III: Group Identity, Victim Impact, and Community Relationships in Atrocity Contexts

Chapter 7: Syria after a Decade of Atrocity: Toward a Holistic Healing and Prevention Strategy

Chapter 8: Considering Intergroup Humiliation as a Risk Factor for Conflict and Violence Relapse and for Post-Conflict Mental Health Problems

Chapter 9: Masculinity and Moral Sonhood among Former Non-State Armed Group (NSAG) Members in Mexico and Colombia

Part IV: Ways Forward

Chapter 10: Multidisciplinary Needs and Assets Assessment for Atrocity Prevention: Values, Competencies, and Implications for Education, Training, and Collaboration

Chapter 11: Adapting a Transdiagnostic Mental Health Approach based on Prescriptive Matching in Post-Genocide Rwanda

Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum is Associate Professor of Clinical Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law where she directs the Benjamin B. Ferencz Human Rights and Atrocity Prevention Clinic and the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights (CLIHHR).

Caitlin O. Mahoney is Associate Professor of Psychology at Metropolitan State University in St Paul, MN.

Amy E. Meade is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and currently holds a joint faculty appointment as a Part-Time Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and as Assistant Psychologist at McLean Hospital.

Arlan F. Fuller is the Chief Operating Officer of Conflict Dynamics International. He worked for 12 years at Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, serving as its executive director for seven years.