Psychosocial Workers and Indigenous Religious Leaders: An Integrated Vision for Collaboration in Humanitarian Crisis Response

Abstract

Indigenous religious leaders can be the most trusted organic helping agents within vulnerable communities, but often lack orientation to the language and paradigms of the mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) professionals responding to their communities after a crisis. Similarly, MHPSS professionals work within paradigms which do not always match the indigenous world views of the vulnerable people they seek to help and therefore can undermine community stability while attempting to provide a service. In parallel, the spiritual care offered by indigenous religious leaders does not always optimally intersect with evidence-based MPHSS interventions, although it is highly likely that both approaches to care provide important benefits to the community, some of which are missing or underemphasized in one or the other. Training approaches designed to orient religious leaders to the work of MHPSS are usually funded and delivered by MHPSS professionals and tend to leverage MHPSS assumptions and portray MHPSS interventions as the most important lines of effort in care. This may leave religious leaders feeling uncertain of their ability to contribute to multi-disciplinary efforts without migrating away from their own foundational assumptions about humanity, illness, and wellness. Often missing from the field is a parallel effort in training which offers MHPSS professionals insight into the efficacy of indigenous spiritual interventions of various kinds and how working alongside indigenous religious leaders can aid them in protecting against the well-known pathologizing tendencies present in their own models of care. The authors are experienced in working during and after community crisis with both MHPSS professionals and indigenous religious leaders and offer an integrated vision for combined training and combined support planning that may facilitate collaboration after crisis in vulnerable communities.