Professional Training in Kosovo

The Healing the Wounds of War (HWW) program began in the hills of rural Kosovo during 1998 when hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians were driven from their homes by a brutal Serbian military offensive. Since then the Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) has provided training to more than 600 health and mental health professionals, teachers and community leaders who are helping men, women and children to overcome the emotional traumas of war and its aftermath.

From the first full-scale training program held in Macedonia for refugee Kosovar physicians in May of 1999, the HWW Kosovo program has evolved into a locally supported and sustained component of the nationwide Community Mental Health system. This represents the first time that the approaches and techniques of mind-body medicine have been formally recognized and integrated into a nationwide system of health and mental health care. The Center for Mind-Body Medicine now has 10 Kosovar faculty members — all leading psychiatrists and psychologists — who continue to lead workshops and mind-body training programs for their peers. Some of them also serve as CMBM international faculty members on other HWW projects — bringing their experience of war and their deep knowledge of the our program to professionals in other areas affected by mass psychological trauma.

The Kosovo program is also sustained by a group of teachers in the Suhareka region — a region that was particularly devastated by loss of life and homes, mass atrocities, rapes and beatings. These teachers, who were first trained in the CMBM model in 1999, have since worked with more than 600 students in their high school and have seen dramatic decreases in the children’s levels of PTSD — from 88% to 38% as a result (read more on this research). They have since formed their own local non-governmental organization, Grupi Psikosocial, and are sought out to assist and train other schools and local NGOs throughout Kosovo.

Since that first visit to Kosovo in 1998, we are proud of the accomplishments of the HWW program. We are demonstrating that this program, which is now led entirely by our Kosovar colleagues, is having a powerful effect on decreasing levels of stress, anxiety and anger and improving mood among those who receive it. Leading psychologists and psychiatrists now supervise these programs throughout the country as they help their communities recover from trauma, anxiety and depression. We are reaching the people who need us most and have become a true partner to, and supporter of, the national healthcare system.

 

Helpful Documents:

Dr. James Gordon's Kosovo Journal (PDF 75 KB)

Read article in Koha Ditore (Kosovo newspaper) (translated) (PDF 13 KB)

CMBM Research: "Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Postwar Kosovo High Sschool Students Using Mind-Body Skills Groups" (PDF 293 KB)

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This program has done more than any other to give us the tools to help our families and communities heal from the trauma of war.

- Afrim Blyta, MD, Director of Neuropsychiatry, Prishtina University Hospital, Kosovo





I had the opportunity to talk about the things that have preoccupied me and I could never express to anyone else, and I felt very relieved after I shared them and expressed them here with the others- it was precisely the feeling of a safe place and building of trust within the group that enabled me such a thing.

- Nurse, Mental Health Centre, Ferizaj, Kosovo