Improving Mental Health Services for Survivors of Sexual Violence in the DRC

This case developed by the Global Health Delivery Project describes a mental health treatment program in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for victims of gender-based violence (GBV) in conflict settings. The case traces implementation and evaluation efforts by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to perform two randomized control trials that measured the mental health effects of two interventions: Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), and a village microfinance program that also incorporated mental health treatment measures. The case explores the significant staffing challenges to conducting rigorous research in an active conflict area, discusses the successes at training local workers in CPT despite low levels of formal education and high illiteracy rates, and asks how such results in the global mental health literature might help improve services for vulnerable populations. The case would be suitable for college and graduate coursework on GBV, humanitarian aid in conflict and disaster settings, health policy, and mental health; it would also be suitable in professional training of international aid workers.

Learning Objectives: A productive class discussion will allow students to appreciate the challenge of meeting human resource needs to provide mental health care, the complexity of implementation and empirical study of mental health services, and the ethics and challenges of conducting randomized controlled trials in conflict settings.

The Global Health Delivery (GHD) Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration between Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, investigates the management decisions behind disease treatment and prevention globally. The Global Health Delivery (GHD) Case Collection is a set of teaching case studies that are available for all at no cost online through Harvard Business Publishing, GHDonline, and The Case Centre.