Providing psychosocial care to alleviate some of the trauma associated with major disasters such as the South Asia earthquake and Asian tsunami is vital in ensuring the long-term recovery of those most affected.

ActionAid measures the success of its emergency work by how well people are living six months, a year or two years after a disaster. That means paying attention to their physical and mental well-being. We don’t medicalise their problems or treat normal grief as though it were a mental illness. We develop and support ways in which people can cope, personally and as a community, with what may seem an incomprehensible experience. This process is known as psychosocial care.

Dealing with psychosocial issues from the outset helps those caught up in disasters to recover more quickly and contributes to long term stability at a community level. ActionAid has built up key expertise in psychosocial care starting with the Orissa Super-Cyclone, then the Gujarat and Bam earthquakes. We now run an innovative training programme in the tsunami affected areas of Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and The Maldives.

ActionAid was the first organisation to respond to psychosocial needs from within the communities after the Orissa Super-Cyclone. Since then ActionAid has been developing and improving its holistic, community-led approach to working with psychosocial needs of people after disasters.