Indian Journal of Health and Wellbeing

Rita Rani Talukdar ¹, Nesmita Das ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Psychology, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam, IN

Abstract

Through out ages, society and its members have withstood countless tragedies and acts of violence, natural disasters, plagues and acts of war, among others. Among them the scourge of ethnic conflict has become one of the most destructive threats to the human condition. The current study aims to explore the psycho-social burden experienced by the victims (N = 60) of Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) area of Assam in Kokrajhar in the year 2013 and examine the need for psycho-social care for the survivors of ethnic conflict in order to promote positive mental health and personal well-being. Terrorism Catastrophizing Scale (TCS) and a semi-structured interview schedule was used in order to explore the experiences of the victims of this disastrous man-made disaster Findings of this study revealed that the victims of ethnic violence experienced various psycho-social burden and there is an urgent need for providing psycho-social care to these victims in order to foster positive mental health and resilience among the individuals and the society.

Keywords

Ethnic Violence, Victims, Psycho-Social Burden, Psycho-Social Care.

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Rita Rani Talukdar ¹, Nesmita Das ¹

Affiliations
1 Department of Psychology, Gauhati University, Gauhati, Assam, IN

Abstract

India is a land of disasters'. Every type of disasters (natural, man-made) has been experienced by the nation in the last century. Both the kinds of disaster negatively affects human beings, social and service structure of the society, community or environment. The victims of these disaster can be classified as direct, secondary and indirect victims. Irrespective of the type of victims,all of them share commonalities of suffering at both physical, psychological level leading to "psycho-social burden". Unfortunately, the suffering of the victims are not understood in its true perspective and are more often forgotten after the climax of the monstrous episode is over. Thus, the current paper aims to explore the various type of psycho-social burden witnessed by the direct and secondary victims of one of the worst terror attack witnessed by people of Assam.The present study focuses on 30th October,2008 Assam serial blast labelled as "black day" since the occurrence of the disaster. The paper also tries to identify the coping mechanism adopted by them in order to handle with the crisis and the necessity of psycho-social care among the victims. The total number of participants selected for the current study was 10 families comprising direct and secondary victims using purposive sampling from the district of Barpeta in Assam. An in-depth interview was conducted based on the semi-structured interview guide developed and the verbatim were analysed using thematic analysis. The study attempted to understand the data using the qualitative approach (social constructivism and phenomenology) in order to explore the meaning rather than causes of the disaster. The interviews revealed that the victims were witnessing a lot of psycho-soctal burden and they adopted various copmg mechanism to deal with the crisis witnessed. An immediate necessity of psycho-social care or support was revealed among the participants.

Keywords

Victims, Psycho-Social Burden, Coping Mechanisms, Disaster Mental Health, Psycho-Social Care.

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