Scaling Up Family Therapy in Fragile, Conflict-Affected States

This article discusses the design and delivery of two international family therapy-focused mental health and psychosocial support training projects, one in a fragile state and one in a post-conflict state. The training projects took place in Southeast Asia and the Middle East/North Africa. Each was funded, supported, and implemented by local, regional, and international stakeholders, and delivered as part of a broader humanitarian agenda to develop human resource capacity to work with families affected by atrocities. The two examples illustrate how task-shifting/task-sharing and transitional justice approaches were used to inform the scaling-up of professionals involved in each project. They also exemplify how state-citizen phenomena in each location affected the project design and delivery.