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

by Jack Saul

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.

217 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard Jack Saul on Amanpour and was interested in hearing how his study of community response to 911 could be applied to 2020 Covid-19 as a shared trauma. The book addressed similar experiences and stages of collective trauma. I would like to hear what Saul's work has been during Covid and, besides similarities that are describes in the introductory sections, what his observances are in the stages of trauma and in community resilience, although Covid, unlike the studies of 911 and Liberians in NY, is not localized within specific communities.

[Madisen Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was assigned this book during school, and really enjoyed it. My other school work became a priority as I just now finished it, but it gave a really good look into how a very large community came together to recover from such a terrible and catastrophic event (9/11). The different interventions discussed were extremely helpful and definitely added to my learning this quarter. I felt some disconnect towards the end of the book when the Liberian community was highlighted, but other than that it was a nice read that I would recommend to budding professionals looking to work in post-disaster aid and recovery work.