Acquiring Professional and Humanitarian Competencies

Contextual challenges and the extreme vulnerability of the service recipients in dire need of assistance elevate the importance of specialized professional and multidisciplinary competencies in GMH. This chapter discusses specialized GMH competencies and drafts the path to professionalization of this sector. The proposed curriculum consists of four blocks of systematically organized and interconnected training modules and courses where multidisciplinary GMH professionals can enter at any level based on their primary discipline and goals. The curriculum suggests coursework and additional training that are most helpful for acquiring the GMH specialization as a specialization. The licensing or certification boards predetermine the core courses that are mandatory for any MH profession. The elective courses consistent with nature of GMH work can be multicultural counseling and refugee MH, crisis intervention, trauma-specific interventions, and group dynamics, which assist with understanding the collective reactions to trauma. In a supervised practice, the MH providers can choose a placement that will help them acquire experience and skills that later will be helpful in humanitarian work, e.g., MH providers working with refugees will learn to provide counseling to culturally diverse people who don’t speak English. Continuing education and volunteering with NGOs allow prospective GMH providers to gain insight into humanitarian systems and ethics and learn skills for professional self-reliance.