Case Studies Regarding Responses to Distress in Extreme Events

In the contemporary world, experiencing extreme events have become part and parcel of many individuals and communities’ everyday realities. From genocide and war, state violence, economic crashes, to pandemics and severe climate change, extreme conditions and events have been made commonplace as never before, leading to severe collective and intergenerational suffering, displacement, and material vulnerabilities. Within these radical times, humanitarian and medical interventions, and their discourses of recovery and social justice, seem lacking, inappropriate in scale, and many times unfitting. This panel is focused around interdisciplinary inquiries into life, recovery in violent and extreme times. It is a follow-up of the, ‘Researching Responses to Distress Caused by Extreme Events: A Virtual World Cafe for Mental Health Researchers and Practitioners’ held in October, 2024. We look at how individuals and communities live in extreme times, mapping their ways of healing, recovery and rebuilding, and the forms of psychological, medical and economic distress that they experience. We also examine the various services, interventions and regimes and policies of care around extreme events, assessing their efficiency. In this panel, we draw on ethnographic, sociological and clinical approaches from various regions like South-East Europe, the Middle East, Latin American and Asia, to discuss our connected histories, current trends and research gaps.

Each of the authors will offer insights through case studies based on their research to date. One of the case studies will focus on the Virtual World Cafe noted above.