The Mechanisms of Psychosocial Injury Following Human Rights Violations

                    Since the creation of this blog in 2010, its counter of visualizations doesn't work and the same is happening with my YouTube channel since its creation in 2020. For no reason,  I'm being  harmed in so many ways and for more than two decades. Why can I not have a YouTube channel and blog with their counter of visualizations working like everyone else? However, now all the world is demanding justice and equality. The Brazilian institutions including from the federal, state and city government must do more to increase political inclusion, fairness, responsiveness to public demands. Once again I'd like to thank everyone doing this worldwide movement stronger than ever, using their time and internet to raise awareness to injustices happening around the world. I'll be forever grateful to those helping with their solidarity. If you want to know my channel, watch my videos, https://youtube.com/@lucianofietto4773?si=kzZQtwV_02bTPVYA. Despite rumours that I wouldn't be a candidate, I'm now a candidate for city councilor and my number is 77650.  This post is a summary of the article with the incomplete title above published at https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/articles/article-pdf/id1509579.pdf

                         When human rights are systematically violated, the legacy can be enduringly toxic for individuals, cultures, and societies. In the context of political violence, events such as being threatened, witnessing the deaths of others, being tortured, and bullied, witnessing atrocities are enacted with the purpose of instilling terror, or demonstrating the power of the perpetrating group. For victims, these experiences are often also accompanied by forced disconnection from familial, social and cultural communities and resources. Not surprisingly, research has demonstrated that exposure to human rights violations, coupled with enduring deprivation and adversity, affects mental health outcomes, most notably creating risk for psychological disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. There is a long-standing recognition, however, that these diagnostic categories may be inadequate to describe the effects of these events across multiple domains. Survivors of human rights violations (HRVs) also often exhibit a range of other reactions, including profound and impairing changes to self-efficacy, and core existential beliefs, as well as pervasive feelings of anger, humiliation and betrayal. We draw on and integrate diverse lines of inquiry across multiple domains of human functioning (social, psychological,etc) to propose three key pathways by which violence, displacement, and refugee-related disruptions cause and maintain psychosocial injury, which we define as psychological distress and impairment in psychological and social functioning in survivors of human rights violations. To date, however, no research has examined the individual and combined association between these factors and post-human rights violations mental health. Our proposed framework draws on and extends previous research and models of care by integrating established theoretical principles of the psychological effects of trauma, empirical evidence from clinical and social psychology, clinical observation from work conducted with survivors of human rights violations and contextual factors related to human rights violations. In settings where HRVs typically occur, the individual may be victim to countless unpredictable instances of persecution; further, he may witness atrocities perpetrated against family, friends, or strangers while being powerless to intervene. This sense of helplessness may be compounded as the person is stripped of control of other areas of his life. Traumatic stress have also highlighted the importance of perceptions of control during and after a traumatic event. HRVs are often related to persecution on the basis of an aspect of ethnic, political, religious, cultural, or other identity. Violence, persecution, and the intentional infliction of trauma directly violate the status of the victim as a worthwhile human being, deserving of basic human rights. One critical question is whether it is necessary to develop models of prevention and treatment that specifically target factors that cause posttraumatic symptoms and functional impairment after exposure to HRVs. One of the most strongly validated treatment for PTSD is prolonged exposure therapy, which requires repeated imaginal reliving of the trauma memory. Recent research has attested to the efficacy of narrative exposure therapy in reducing symptoms of PTSD and improving functioning in a variety of groups. In this article, we integrated existing lines of theoretical and research inquiry to propose a comprehensive model of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between exposure to HRVs and psychological suffering. Further, such research should take into account the potentially compounding or healing impact of the posttrauma environment that commonly surrounds HRVs would have significant implications for the development of treatment interventions that directly target maintaining factors to reduce distress and functional impairment in individuals exposed to HRVs.