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The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating and disproportionate effects of structures of violence that produce vulnerability in communities of color globally, including with respect to mental health-care provision. While coping and resilience are dominant mainstream frameworks to understand mental health in crisis--both in Palestine and elsewhere--the three contributors to this roundtable were asked to offer a rejoinder to that approach. They reflect on the pandemic as an opportunity to revisit how we understand and advocate for critical approaches to mental health in Palestine in the midst of prolonged crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors report on episodes in which five professional mental health organizations—for the most part associations for psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy—have covertly tried to silence members who bring attention to the issue of human rights abuses inflicted by the Israeli occupation of Palestine. These various vignettes illustrate how the leadership of these organizations systematically attempts to limit the activism of their members, even in their "free time," and to forbid the introduction of discussion of Israel/Palestine into their newsletters, meetings, chatrooms, and other organizational venues—despite the fact that these organizations profess their commitment to exploring themes of social justice and to the principle of open dialogue. Implications and recommendations are discussed, particularly the practical need for transparency on the part of our organizations and the intellectual need for a more complete theoretical understanding of the roles of history, ideology, and collective meaning within mental life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental health is a key component of health, yet appropriate care is limited. Evidence concerning child and adolescent mental health has predominantly come from western countries, while the Middle East region, with a large youth population, has reported very little on it. This original, cross-sectional study of child and adolescent psychiatry in the Middle East provides an assessment of current postgraduate programs, services and what is needed to build workforce capacity. Academic psychiatrists from 16 Middle East countries were invited to form a Consortium to map current postgraduate training as one of the determinants of available child and adolescent psychiatry services, identify gaps in the distribution of child and adolescent psychiatrists, and propose potential steps to improve access to child and adolescent mental health care. The study collected data from 15 of the 16 countries invited (no data provided from Yemen). The study revealed underdeveloped child and adolescent psychiatry academic systems throughout the region. Despite recognition of the specialty in a majority of the countries (11/15), only six countries had established a designated child and adolescent psychiatry training program. The overall shortage of child and adolescent mental health specialists varied, yet all Consortium members reported a need for additional child and adolescent psychiatry specialists and allied professionals. Lack of child and adolescent psychiatry specialized programs in place throughout the region has evidently contributed to the shortage of qualified child and adolescent mental health workforce in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors, a Palestinian psychiatrist working in the West Bank and a Jewish American child psychiatrist in New York, report on varieties of problematic transference and countertransference phenomena observed among mental health clinicians and patients across the Israeli/Palestinian divide. Reciprocal transference and countertransference anxieties were asymmetrical, reflecting the broader power relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The Israeli clinicians' need to regulate and to silence Palestinian 'aggression'-either real or presumed-interfered with empathy, trust, genuine dialogue, and learning. The authors suggest that, to account for these findings, the psychoanalytic model of collective trauma must be integrated with motivational models from other disciplines in order to capture the roles played by social forces such as political propaganda, the silencing of social dissent, and longstanding historical agendas of military and economic domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]