Reporting from the War Zone: Treating Psychotrauma

On August 2, Meretz USA hosted Dr. Naomi Baum, Director of Children’s Services at the Psychotrauma Center of the Hertzog Hospital in Jersualem. Dr. Baum spoke about her program’s many initiatives in response to the current crisis and about specific techniques for addressing the stress and trauma that residents of Israel’s north find themselves facing today. At present, Dr. Baum noted, there are about one million evacuees from Israel’s north, many of them temporarily residing in Jerusalem.

Dr. Baum’s programming focuses on helping children and adults build “resilience,” a term that she described as a type of flexibility – the ability to connect with stress and trauma and also leave them behind. The Psychotrauma Center works with children in summer camps in the Jerusalem area. It is also working with parents groups and other adults, teaching relaxation techniques and skills for coping with stress, as well as engaging in “psycho-education”: Teaching what trauma is, how people normally react to it, and how they recover from it. Dr. Baum explained that just knowing one’s reactions to trauma are normal goes a long way towards helping one heal.

The Psychotrauma Center also provides an array of services to Arab communities in Israel. Dr. Baum explained that the Center has facilitators working in Arabic and that its web site, www.traumaweb.org, which provides information and tools for coping with wartime as well as forums where people can connect with others, is available in Arabic and is accessed all over the Arabic-speaking world. Dr. Baum conducted a training seminar with mental health workers in East Jerusalem and found that the majority of “resilience” tools cross cultural lines and were useful and applicable to the Arabic-speaking community there.