Recommended Cambodian Measures of Child and Adult Mental Health

This report, prepared by PAU alumnus, Dr. Edward Palmer, initially presents a review of published and unpublished articles and reports on the rates of adult and child mental health disorders in Cambodia, including a section on maintaining factors. A cursory review of the psychosocial distress construct then follows. Finally, a review of psychological measures used in prior research in Cambodia is presented, some of which were not published, but nonetheless are based on studies with large samples sizes and sound psychometric methodology. After presenting each measure, all of which are divided into psychosocial distress measures and process measures, a recommendation by the current author is made regarding whether or not each particular measure should be used in the forthcoming migration study. The expertise and discretion of the research group will ultimately decide which measures will be included in the study. Lastly, the measures that were available to the author, in both Khmer and English, were compiled into a separate addendum.

The Child Psychosocial Distress Screener and the Child Functional Impairment Scale

This report presents the preliminary findings from the 2013 Cambodia development and validation study of two mental health screening tools in Cambodia: The Khmer versions of the Child Psychological Distress Screener and the Child Functional Impairment Scale. These two instruments were developed and validated within the Cambodian context by the Psychology Department of the Royal University of Phnom Penh in order to aid subsequent research which may, in turn, provide nationally representative data on the prevalence of mental health disorders and distress among Cambodian youth.

William J. Froming, Ph.D., Provost at Palo Alto University and researcher with a longstanding interest in post-genocide trauma intervention and healing, authored “Healing in a Postgenocidal Country” which was published in Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology.

Rwanda experienced a ferocious genocide in 1994, with 800,000 people killed in 100 days. It remains a stain on the world’s conscience because the international community failed to intervene. This article is part observation and part reflection on the country’s recovery from the genocide. I have been traveling there for over 10 years and have witnessed the destruction and reconstruction of the country. This reconstruction has been on both a societal and an individual level. The article describes a number of strategies employed by the government to bring Rwanda back from its shattered state, many of which have proven successful. Addressing the trauma on an individual level remains a significant challenge. Rwanda’s recovery from the genocide has been remarkable, but efforts to heal individuals need to continue in order to build a country that looks to the future rather than one that is haunted and defined by its genocide.

PAU researchers co-authored two chapters in the newly published Why Global Health Matters: How to (Actually) Make the World a Better Place edited by Chris S. Stout.