Chapter 18 - Complex Trauma and Complex Responses to Trauma in the Asylum Context

Summary

Both the authors are clinicians who work at the Helen Bamber Foundation (HBF), a human rights charity that works with asylum seekers and refugees who have experienced extreme violations of their human rights.

Since she entered the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in May 1945, only a few weeks after its liberation, our Founder, Helen Bamber, worked continuously for nearly 70 years as a pioneer in the documentation of extreme human cruelty and in assessing the needs and providing comprehensive care for survivors of extreme cruelty. Helen’s overwhelming sense of mission and of duty were closely linked to her early experiences at Bergen Belsen, which also provided a starting point for her notion of integrated care. She spoke of bearing witness, through the detailed documentation of the mental and physical evidence of the cruelty to which her clients had been subjected, which are cornerstones of the model of integrated care.