Gender, mental health and resilience in armed conflict: listening to life stories of internally displaced women in Colombia

Abstract

For over 60 years, Colombia has endured violent civil conflict forcibly displacing more than 8 million people. Recent efforts have begun to explore mental health consequences of these contexts, with an emphasis on national surveys. To date few Colombian studies explore mental health and well-being from a lived experience perspective. Those that do, overlook processes that enable survival. In response to this gap, we conducted a life history study of seven internally displaced Colombian women in the Cundinamarca department, analysing 18 interview sessions and 36 hours of transcripts. A thematic network analysis, informed by Latin-American perspectives on gender and critical resilience frameworks, explored women’s coping strategies in response to conflict-driven hardships related to mental well-being. Analysis illuminated that: (1) the gendered impacts of the armed conflict on women’s emotional well-being work through exacerbating historical gendered violence and inequality, intensifying existing emotional health challenges, and (2) coping strategies reflect women’s ability to mobilise cognitive, bodied, social, material and symbolic power and resources. Our findings highlight that the sociopolitical contexts of women’s lives are inseparable from their efforts to achieve mental well-being, and the value of deep narrative and historical work to capturing the complexity of women’s experiences within conflict settings. We suggest the importance of social interventions to support the mental health of women in conflict settings, in order to centre the social and political contexts faced by such marginalised groups within efforts to improve mental health.

Using participatory action research to reimagine community mental health services in Colombia: a mixed-method study protocol

“…Focus groups will provide an opportunity to complete group cognitive interviews to explore meaning and perceptions of measures 27. This critical stage is informed by previous pilot work conducted in Colombia by members of our team 6 28…”

Mental health services implementation in Colombia – a systematic review

“…The inclusion of gender, race or age/disability perspectives in mental health discussions in Colombia is still unsettled. As previous studies have endorsed (136), it is suggested for future mental health research to string together socioeconomic factors that shape mental health and well-being and not limit the discussion towards institutional performance based exclusively on indicators. It is necessary to explore expanded viewpoints in people from LMICs, who face certain social and political circumstances.…”

The struggle for the social: rejecting a false separation in our engagement with 'social' worlds in mental health spaces

“…Women were exposed to multiple violence(s) -and in this exposure, re ect the multiplicity of the social. The con ict, the direct vector of physical forms of violence in women's lives, is anchored to socio-political and socio-structural dynamics, a con ict rooted in unequal land distribution, the marginalisation and exclusion of rural, indigenous, and black communities [14]. In attempting to articulate and hold on to women's complexities in telling of their stories, I fought against reviewers who called for us to divide the paper into various parts, calling for a focus on motherhood, OR the political economy of violence, OR mental health -but not the intersection of these three issues.…”