Making the Invisible Visible: Slow Violence, Mental Health and Resilience in Gaza

Introduction

This research focuses on an urgent humanitarian case: Gaza, and builds on a preliminary study supported by the Wellcome Trust demonstrating how power, slow violence and mental health are entangled. Specifically, our aim here is to make the invisible and long-term effects of violence visible, i.e., to examine how violence affects Gaza’s young generation in terms of their increasing vulnerability to mental health challenges, and how existing resilience networks could serve as a vehicle for better strategic interventions in mental health. Our main objective is to give public and academic visibility to the mental health conditions of Gazan young people by: (1) collecting up-to-date data on the extent of mental health deterioration among Gazan youth; (2) giving visibility to personal, youth narratives; (3) analysing existing and varied mental health interventions; (4) developing a set of recommendations for future policies and interventions.

By Ziad Abu Mustafa, Yasser Abu Jamei, Michelle Pace, Haim Yacobi

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