ABSTRACT
This chapter explores major emotional and mental health problems among domestic violence survivors, attending specifically to the problems of depression, PTSD, suicide intentions, and substance abuse. The chapter then presents mental health service approaches and challenges to service provision, focusing on community-based domestic violence agency, mental health, and substance abuse treatment settings. Implications for service approaches based on culturally sensitive, trauma-informed care are discussed. Lastly, the chapter presents key intervention approaches for domestic violence survivors’ emotional and mental health problems, including cognitive behaviour theory, mindfulness interventions, advocacy, and trauma-informed substance abuse treatments. This section summarizes the evidence concerning the effectiveness of each intervention and provides further considerations for implementation in practice. Throughout, the chapter attends to the evidence on which these topics and issues are based, including the limits of the research and the ways in which cultural context intersects with these issues; and it discusses key challenges for the domestic violence field in considering how best to address survivors’ emotional and mental health.
