GBV, Primary Trauma & Trauma Resilience & Understanding Self-help Therapy Utilization in Uganda

An indigenous rebel outfit waged a decades' civil war in eastern and northern Uganda until the early 2000s. This rebellion resulted in forceful internal displacement of most of the local population leading to unwarranted misery. In the aftermath of this rebellion, the internally displaced returned to their areas of origin. However, a significant proportion of these formerly internally displaced persons (fIDPs) have since then been plagued with a plethora of adversities including high levels of primary trauma, frequent experiences of domestic violence and impaired social economic resilience (SER) levels. A newly developed psychosocial therapeutic intervention called the 'trauma resilience \& understanding self-help therapy' (TRUST) was revealed to be qualitatively effective in managing high levels of primary trauma, experiences of domestic violence and poor SER levels among refugees and fIDPs. However, the quantitative effectiveness of TRUST and the psychological operators among the fIDPs and refugees within which it is grounded still remain a scientific mystery. Hence, an appropriate prospective community-based cohort research study was conducted to this effect. The investigators carried out a descriptive community-based prospective study from November 2022 to March 2023 among 284 randomly recruited adults who were fIDPs living in northern Uganda using quantitative data collection techniques in natural experiments conducted via repeated assessments. The resultant data were analyzed using univariate, bivariate and multivariate linear, logistic and Poisson regression as well as determining the effect sizes of the community-based utilization of TRUST on the high levels of primary trauma, experiences of domestic violence and poor SER levels among fIDPs living in northern Uganda. These findings were compared with those obtained among a randomly selected control group of fIDPs living in northern Uganda who were cross-matched according to their age and gender, were experiencing high levels of primary trauma and domestic violence as well as poor SER levels and had not been trained in the community-based utilization of TRUST.