Indigenous aid workers carry out the majority of humanitarian aid work, yet there is little empirical information available on their support needs in different contexts. Focus groups (N = 26: Study 1) and a survey (N = 137; Study 2) were conducted with Guatemalan aid workers to explore their exposure to violence, posttraumatic stress symptoms, burnout, support needs, and motivators. Participants reported experiencing an average of 13 events of community violence and 17% reported symptoms consistent with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Direct community violence exposure and levels of emotional exhaustion were positively related to PTSD symptoms, while levels of personal accomplishment were inversely related to PTSD symptoms. Expressed support needs, motivators and rewards for aid work in the face of adversity are also reported as potential protective factors for further exploration. Implications for training and support of aid workers in similar contexts are also suggested.

Community violence has reached concerning proportions in El Salvador, possibly affecting all sectors of society. To date, little attention has focused on the effects of violence exposure on educators in Central American countries. This study examined the relationships between lifetime community violence exposure, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology, and burnout in 2 independent samples of elementary and high school teachers in El Salvador—Study 1 ( N = 193) and Study 2 ( N = 257). Findings indicated that teachers across both samples were exposed to multiple violent events over their lifetimes. Results of 2 separate regression analyses with bootstrapping indicated significant indirect effects of violence exposure on burnout through PTSD symptomatology across these independent samples. These results suggest that teachers who were exposed to more frequent lifetime violence were at greater risk for occupational burnout, and this link was partly attributable to PTSD symptomatology. These findings implicate teachers’ exposure to violence as a potentially disruptive influence in educational settings and underscore the need for developing strategies for training and support of teachers in El Salvador and other educators working in high violence, postconflict Central American settings.

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Understanding the role of religion in mental illness has always been complicated as some people turn to religion to cope with their illness, whereas others turn away. The overarching purpose of this study was to draw on quantitative and qualitative information to illuminate ways in which religiousness might be associated with changes in depressive symptomatology in a spiritually integrated inpatient treatment program. This repeated measures mixed method study examined the relations among religious comfort (RC), religious strain (RS), and depression in an inpatient psychiatric sample. Adult inpatients (N=248; Mage = 40.78 years; SD = 18.97) completed measures of RC, RS, and depression at pre-and post-treatment. Focusing on patient responses to open-ended questions regarding spiritual perspectives on their mental illness, qualitative themes were deduced via content analytic coding procedures to further clarify quantitative findings. Autoregressive cross-lagged panel models were used to test potential reciprocal influences among RC, RS, and depressive symptomatology between admission and discharge. Scores on RS decreased, whereas scores on RC increased. At both intake and discharge, depression was inversely associated with RC and directly correlated with RS. In addition, RC on admission was inversely associated with depressive symptom severity at discharge, whereas RS on admission did not predict later depression. Religious affiliation was also positively associated with RC. This is the first study to document a direct association between RS and depression, along with an inverse association with RC, in an inpatient psychiatric sample.

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