Noemi Guerra, Carla Rangel, Shruti Parthasarathy, Jennifer Okolo, Cara Fallon, Catherine Panter-Brick, Hannah Strohmeier
Citation:
Humanitarian workers are exposed to chronic stressors, such as long working hours, separation from family and friends, and safety challenges at the workplace, which places them at a heightened risk of developing common mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, and burnout. Typically, psycho- social interventions targeting humanitarian workers aim to prevent the development of mental health problems and promote well-being. Despite humanitarian organizations’ responsibility to care for their workers, current support options are insufficient and underutilized. To fill this gap, arts- based interventions can be utilized as they have been shown to increase the psychosocial well-being of care workers through culturally competent and widely adaptable ways. This policy brief lays out the potential arts-based interventions have to improve the psychosocial well-being of humanitarian workers, explains the emotional healing art provides, and offers case studies of arts-based interventions in humanitarian and humanitarian-like settings. Based on this research, we have developed five policy recommendations that can help guide humanitarian organizations toward the effective integration of arts-based interventions into their staff support portfolios.