Mental Health: Taking a Proactive Approach to Support Staff in Mine Action
CISR Journal
This article is brought to you by the Center for International Stabilization and Recovery (CISR) from issue 25.1 of The Journal of Conventional Weapons Destruction available on the JMU Scholarly Commons and Issuu.com.
By Laura Biscaglia, Abigail Jones, and Robert White [ Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining ]
As public awareness on mental health in the workplace has increased in recent years, the humanitarian sector—along with the CHS Alliance, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Antares Foundation, and others—has been stressing the need for aid organizations to ensure that their duty of care responsibilities encompass the health, safety, security, and well-being of staff.¹
This article aims to contribute to existing conversations on how actors in the mine action (MA) sector can work together to promote mental health in the workplace as well as prevent and mitigate adverse mental health outcomes. The article is also a call to action for MA management and leadership teams to invest in staffs’ mental well-being. Through interviews with key stakeholders² and desk-based review of existing literature, this article’s focus is two-fold. First, it provides an overview of stressors on the mental health of different profiles of humanitarian workers. Second, it conceptualizes poor mental health outcomes as an organizational risk factor...
