Addressing the Mental Health of Aid Workers

Abstract

Many students at the School of International Service have personal experience with aid work. In my courses, I’ve heard perspectives from peers who are Peace Corps alumni, NGO employees, military service members, and international volunteers. Learning from the stories of my fellow students has been an invaluable aspect of my time at SIS. In my paper for the Journal of International Service, I draw upon an experience of my own to bring attention to the mental health implications of working in the field of international development.

I spent the summer of 2017 as a volunteer teacher at a refugee camp in Greece. While my on-the-ground experience was limited to a few months, my time in Greece offered me insight into the day-to-day life of an aid worker. I expected my job to be challenging, but I wasn’t prepared for the intense mental and emotional strain of hearing about the harsh realities my refugee students faced. Simultaneously, I felt immense guilt for thinking about my own mental health amidst much greater suffering. It was only when talking to fellow volunteers that I came to understand the concepts of compassion fatigue and secondary trauma as they relate to aid work. I had previously associated these phenomena with nurses and first responders, but hadn’t yet considered humanitarian workers as part of the at-risk population for these conditions.

In 2015, 73% of surveyed humanitarian aid workers from the Global Development Professionals Network reported work-related mental health issues including anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and post-traumatic stress disorder.[1] Since many SIS students are working towards a career in international development or humanitarian aid, I felt that it was important to explore the impact of this work on mental health. My goal is to help those considering entering the field gain a better understanding of the risks and potential solutions, especially since academic programs and humanitarian organizations rarely address traumatic situations experienced by aid workers. My paper discusses concrete ways to address the mental health of aid workers via pre-departure training, on-the-ground resources, and post-deployment support.

Despite the importance of the topic, I hesitated to write this article. I feared my piece might be interpreted as a call to direct time and resources away from aid recipients and focus on humanitarian workers, a population which tends to be more privileged than those they work to help. My paper does not aim to disregard the needs of recipient populations but rather acknowledges that addressing the mental health of aid workers is an important aspect of caring for humanity as a whole.

I also struggled with how to cover this topic because of my beliefs about the efficacy of aid. We are all aware of the common criticisms of development. Is it simply another form of colonialism? Does it even improve quality of life? Can development truly be environmentally sustainable? These are all important questions, and the international development discipline should continue to grapple with such concerns. But regardless of your thoughts on the morality or efficacy of international development, aid workers today routinely face traumatic situations and have few resources available to help them process and recover from such experiences. I hope my paper can bring awareness to this issue and help those in the field better address the impact of aid work on mental health.