EDITORIAL COMMENTS

Silove's contribution provides a comprehensive and integrative framework for drawing together the multiple issues that may affect traumatized populations. Its value lies in its holistic nature, and the encompassing of the multiple domains that may be relevant in situations of gross trauma. It is also, however, relevant to other human experience in the situation described in this book. It recognizes that the burden of traumatization in the world arises in developing countries and those with complex emergencies as a result of ethno-nationalist conflicts, human rights violation, torture, systematic violence, refugee status and displacement. The domains of threat and safety, loss and attachment, justice, meaning, identity and role, are all relevant in all these contexts, but also in many other disasters and contexts of psychological traumatization.

The model and its underpinning also recognize the different cultural interpretations and meanings of psychological traumatization. It provides a conceptual basis that is meaningful across cultures and settings and obviates arguments that these are simply western cultural interpretations. It also gives an appropriate framework for acute and longer-term interventions that is respectful of the human adaptations of so many of those affected. It cuts across the universalization of formal debriefing, which was never developed or intended for all settings, and sets up a system of meaning for human and compassionate response, as well as practical assistance. In this, it is also relevant for the smaller disasters of life.