Success Healing Trauma in Kosovo

Over the last seven years, the Center’s Healing the Wounds of War program has been integrated into an entire nationwide system of mental healthcare — reaching literally thousands of people who witnessed atrocities and survived brutalities that many of us can never imagine.

The successes of this program in Kosovo have been numerous and compelling.

  • We have created a local infrastructure of support, supervision and consultation through a faculty of prominent Kosovar psychiatrists and psychologists.
  • Mind-body groups are an integral and ongoing program within all of the country’s Community Mental Health Centers (CMHC) and is supported by the Kosovo Ministry of Health. Mind-body coordinators at each CMHC meet with our faculty on a monthly basis.
  • A research study has proven the program’s striking effect on teens — reducing levels of posttraumatic stress from 88% to 38%. Click here to read more about this research
  • Requests continue for more training and for more mind-body groups with children in schools, former prisoners and families of the missing.

We are very pleased to celebrate the success of this program in Kosovo and to acknowledge the significant time and effort on the part of many colleagues who have helped to ensure that it is sustained and that it continues to help those who need it most.

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