ABSTRACT
Mental health is a global concern, and there is a pressing need to develop mental health interventions that can be applied in low- and middle-income countries, especially those that have experienced atrocity crimes. Rwanda is a low-income country that has made tremendous efforts to rebuild the mental healthcare system after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Despite promising initiatives in Rwanda, the right to mental health must be advanced globally to address human rights violations and atrocity crimes. This chapter reviews the emerging global innovations for mental health and the challenges posed by the mental healthcare system in Rwanda. The chapter builds on a paradigm of a transdiagnostic mental health approach that uses prescriptive matching. The approach integrates individual- and group-based therapies in order to address these mental healthcare system challenges in Rwanda, especially given the prevalence of posttraumatic stress and the effects of inter- and transgenerational transmission of trauma in the general population. The suggested paradigm must be flexible and culturally sensitive and could prove to be valuable for genocide and mass atrocity prevention, thereby reducing the mental health burdens in the country while respecting, protecting, and fulfilling the right to mental health for all.
