Mental health work with Gulf War evacuees: the use of a transitional therapeutic space

This paper describes the intervention of a mental health team formed during the Persian Gulf War to provide assistance to people evacuated from their homes after they were seriously damaged or destroyed by Iraqi Scud missiles. The intervention was based on the view that a crisis upsets the person's emotional equilibrium, resulting in a new and alien emotional state, which is frightening to the person involved by virtue of its strangeness. The disturbance may result in the development of a frozen, rigid unadaptive internal state, i.e. trauma. The mental health team used the interaction between external and internal realities, within a transitional space which enabled the development of a potential space.