ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the field research and applied projects in disaster-, conflict- and uneven development-affected Western Darfur (Sudan), Nepal and Syria. It discusses three critical issues that appear to be missed by most international agencies delivering mental health interventions in humanitarian crises, namely, knowledge imperialism driven by medicalised mental health approaches; the implementation of irrelevant mental health relief interventions; and the inability of medicalised mental health approaches to deal with ongoing conflicts and disasters. Contemporary medicalised mental health approaches are fundamentally based on the emergence of science through the European Enlightenment. According to European and North American mental health experts such as Briere and Kessler et al., disasters and conflicts belong to a larger set of potentially traumatic events. The chapter explores the challenges and issues of medicalised mental health approaches to conflict and disaster through the forgotten crisis of Western Darfur; the recent earthquake disaster in Nepal; and the ongoing and extreme crisis in Syria.
