Post-disaster Psychosocial Care for Children
Hello, this is Megumi. I would like to share the impressive seminar, “Post-disaster Psychosocial Care for Children” conducted by Ryoko HONDA san who is a friend of Yamada sensei.
This seminar was mainly about her experience of psychosocial care for children in the aftermath of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku area. As you all know, we had a huge earthquake in the 11th of March. Now, Ms. Honda, she is working for providing psychosocial care to children with a special focus on infants, toddlers and pre-school children in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima with Japan National Committee for UNICEF.
I found it very impressive to know her career since she changed her filed from development to clinical psychology. She told us that she realised that she preferred working more closely with local people at the field level. In the development field, there are various ways to get involved in development issues. While some people work as a researcher, others do as a practitioner. Thus, her case is actually one of our role models to see how people would like to get involved in and consider about development field.
In the seminar, she introduced what is psychosocial support in emergency setting such as post-disaster, Earthquake and Tsunami and explained how therapeutic play would be for urgent care and prevention of traumatisation. Through her presentation, I thought how difficult it is to treat people suffering from the disaster like Earthquake and Tsunami for psychosocial care because it would be easy for me to emphasize with those people. Under this situation, she taught us that it is important not to put too much of ourselves into survivors of the disaster and make balance and control own feeling towards them. That is why refreshment through doing activities such as Yoga is very significant.
In terms of Play Therapy for children, she emphasised that we should observe, describe what the child is doing and put the child’s feeling into words without asking questions, teaching and correcting. She also demonstrated these behaviours through using toys. It was very interesting and fun. Although it seems difficult to talk with and treat children who had a mental illness due to the disaster, doing Play Therapy for those children and understanding how to interact with them would be very helpful.
We would like to thank Honda san and Yamada sensei for giving us a great opportunity to know the different approach towards development field and psychosocial care for children in the post disaster area.
explaining Play Therapy
