Collaborating Centers (Last Updated On: ) International Center for Psychosocial Trauma, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA Syed Arshad Husain, director of the International Center for Psychosocial Trauma at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA, a WFMH Collaborating Center, helped to organize psycho-social relief efforts for victims of the major earthquake in Western India on 26 January 2001. Together with two colleagues he visited the area in February and provided a training program in Bombay for 230 doctors involved in the relief work, and in Ahmedabad for a further 50 mental health professionals. In an interview with Psychiatric News he said he had realized that many of the professionals were traumatized themselves, and encouraged them to meet regularly in a support group. Dr. Husain has extensive experience in providing help for child victims of trauma in Bosnia and Kosovo, and his group drew on that experience to work with several teachers in the earthquake-stricken area on therapeutic techniques for classroom use. After the team returned home they sent various instruction manuals to contacts in India to be translated into local languages. Earlier this year Dr. Husain received the American Medical Association Pride in the Profession award in recognition of his work with children and young people. He heads the department of child and adolescent psychiatry and neurology at the University of Missouri. STARTTS STARRTS, the Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Survivors in New South Wales, Australia, is a WFMH Collaborating Center linked to the Psychiatry Research and Teaching Unit at the University of New South Wales. It has recently developed a program of work with East Timorese refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. Even before the recent crisis in East Timor it had established a Researcher-Advocacy program to assist East Timorese asylum seekers resident in Sydney in the early 1990s. After the humanitarian disaster in 1999 it began to assist refugees placed in Safe Havens established in New South Wales. PRTU-STARTTS also set up a drop-in community care center for resident East Timorese in Sydney who were suffering from grief and stress reactions after the emergency. Subsequently, PRTU and STARTTS organized a coalition of social work associations and organizations concerned with torture and trauma survivors to provide the first initiative for mental health/trauma training and service development in East Timor itself. This program, which still continues, is supported by AusAID, UNHCR and the Ministry of Health in New South Wales. Other STARTTS activities have included services for displaced persons from Kosovo temporarily sheltered in Safe Havens in New South Wales; work with the National Forum for Torture and Trauma Services around Australia; and the development of an Early Assessment and Intervention Program for newly arrived refugees. Prof. Derrick Silove, Director of the PRTU and an active member of STARTTS, co-chairs of the WFMH International Committee for Refugees and Other Migrants with Dr. Solvig Ekblad of Sweden. Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, University of Cape Town, South Africa This Collaborating Center has a training program for doctors from other parts of Africa. Currently two doctors, from Ethiopia and Zambia respectively, are taking postgraduate training in psychiatry, and two others from Ethiopia and Eritrea will join the program shortly. Next year a doctor from Kenya will start a two-year Child and Adolescent Psychiatry postgraduate training program. The head of the Department, Prof. Brian Robertson, was the principal editor for The Textbook of Psychiatry for Southern Africa, published by Oxford University Press in March 2001. This is the first textbook of its kind for medical students and young doctors in the region. The Department has had funding renewed for its community-based child and family mental health project in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. New projects include the establishment of a Unit for Adolescent Health Research. The Department has also been involved in advance planning for World Mental Health Day events in Cape Town this year.