Confronting Stress and Trauma (UNV.2017.013)
Trauma is a global burden, adversely affecting human development, world development, and even world peace. Trauma has not received the attention it deserves, or treatment the support it needs. The contribution large-scale trauma healing could make to enhance social, economic and cultural productivity, as well as individual educability, creativity and well-being, could well be historic. Recent developments have the potential to bring on this large scale healing, for humanitarian and peace operation staff, and for the global population. This open, self-paced advocacy presentation aims to raise awareness and influence policy decisions to support and implement these new developments, and help bring an end to the insidious and unnecessary suffering that trauma wreaks worldwide.
The overall aim of this module is to introduce the international humanitarian, development and UN communities to the large unmet need for psychological trauma care and therapy. It starts by describing the different types of stress and trauma and the dire consequences these can have. After the description of the magnitude of the problem, the module then presents some recent innovations in the field of psychology that have opened up dramatic new possibilities, which hold the promise of an effective response at scale. Going to scale, in turn, poses new challenges and opportunities to the main stakeholder audiences for this module.
At the end of the course participants will be able to:
- Describe the four types of stress and traumatic stress
- Illustrate the global burden of trauma
- Describe three approaches to trauma care/treatment used in this course
- Describe three factors that facilitate scaling up of trauma treatment
- Summarize why global trauma should be included in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
- Recall elements of a successful World Plan for Trauma Treatment
- Argument for the expanded treatment of trauma to key stakeholders
The course is structured in six modules.
- Module 0 – Confronting global trauma: an overview for key audiences
- Module 1 – Stress and resilience in crisis-affected areas
- Module 2 – Introduction to psychological trauma
- Module 3 – Psychological First Aid (PFA)
- Module 4 – EMDR Psychological Second Aid (EMDR PSA)
- Module 5 – Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioural Techniques (CBT)
This advocacy course is a self-guided, self-paced, web-based course that is on-going and can be accessed at any time. The material is presented in text format with visual aids and web-based reference resources. Regular activities allow the participant to test their understanding of and reinforce the message of the course.
The course is open exclusively to United Nations Volunteers, holding a valid contract. Please note that a verfication will be carried out by UNVs Programme prior to the beginning of the course. Only those participants for whom possession of a valid contract is confirmed will be enrolled in the course.
No reimboursement will be possible for participants who enroll without a valid UNV contract.
Technical Requirements
- Minimum hardware and software requirements:
- Platform: Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, ME, XP or superior; MacOS 9 or MacOS X.
- Hardware: 64 MB of RAM, 1 GB of free disk space.
- Software:
- Adobe Acrobat Reader (download for free at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html).
- Adobe Flash Player (download for free at http:/get.adobe.com/flashplayer)
- Microsoft Office (Windows or Apple version) or Open Office (download for free at http://www.openoffice.org )
- Browser: Internet Explorer 8 (download for free at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internetexplorer/worldwide‐sites.aspx; works better with Firefox 3.6 or higher (download for free at http://www.mozilla‐europe.org/en/firefox). Note JavaScript & Cookies must be enabled.
- Modem: 56 K
The course Introduction to Peace Operations has been awarded the 2012 international Open ECBCheck Standards.