Community based MHPSS: Experiences of the field

Mr. Bhava Poudyal started his professional work with CVICT in 1995. He worked in Nepal for 5 years, living and working in the Bhutanese refugee camps for 3 years during his tenure with CVICT. In 2000, he moved to West Africa, to work with CVT, Minneapolis to work in Guinea. Since then, he has been working in different countries in West Africa, South East Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia with various International organizations. He has dedicated his entire career of 25 years in humanitarian MHPSS programs, where he did needs assessment, program design, training and capacity building of mostly paraprofessionals and young psychologists, implementation of the programs and monitoring and evaluation of them. His work has spanned across different forms of traumatic events human beings have faced: torture, rape and sexual violence, gender-based violence, war trauma, families of missing persons, earthquakes, and tsunami. He was a finalist for the Barbara Chester Award for clinicians working with survivors of torture in 2007. LinkedIn

Ms. Jamuna Maharjan Shrestha currently works at TPO Nepal as Clinical manager. She has been working in the mental health and pychosocial counseling field for the past 25 years with various populations including refugees, torture survivors, conflict affected people, trauma survivors especially women and children, SGBV survivors, trafficked survivors and families alike. She is a globally certified Tension & Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) service provider and Common Threads Facilitator. She was also the founding President of AVP Nepal and continues to work as an AVP facilitator with various communities across Nepal and the world, to encourage creative conflict resolution and peace building methods.

Bhava Poudyal’s related publications (full-text articles linked):

  1. A community based MHPSS programs for families of missing persons in Sri Lanka, a replicated model of what he designed in Nepal for the families of missing persons from 2010 to 2012.
  2. A community based MHPSS program for victims of torture in Indonesia, aimed at looking at the effectiveness of the intervention through building the capacity of para-professionals.
  3. A center based and community based MHPSS program in Nepal with victims of torture.
  4. The need to understand local idioms of distress in community based MHPSS programs, Indonesia.