The Disbandment of a Community: A Psychiatric Action Research Project

Abstract

This article discusses individual and communal responses to the stress an Israeli cooperative agricultural settlement in Sinai underwent as it faced disbandment required by the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The authors belonged to a team of five mental health professionals who studied 40 families, beginning more than a year before the evacuation to shortly thereafter Using both direct observation and interviews, the team studied sources of and responses to stress. They found the main stressors to be acute changes in the settlers' expectations, roles, and identities, and responses to be both adaptive and nonadaptive. The authors report that although most of the settlers coped with the evacuation welt they generally suffered damage to their abilities to sustain communal relationships, which may have lasting effects. The article presents preventive measures that may have aided these evacuees and could prove useful for others who are to be uprooted in the future.