Psychosocial and Economic Impacts of Narrative Exposure Therapy for Violence Survivors in Eastern DRC

Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) aims to address PTSD symptoms among survivors of mass violence and torture (Onyut et al., 2004; Schauer, et al., 2005). Mainly, different from other psychosocial interventions which require the survivor to process a single traumatic event in his or her life at a given time, NET treatment recognizes that trauma survivors undergo multiple distressing events within their lifetime (Schauer et al., 2005). Focusing on the traumatic events, the patient constructs a chronological narrative of his or her life story and a coherent narrative is then structured with the assistance of the therapist. They received NET one to three months following their screening and randomization. The therapy involves 8 to 12 individual sessions of about 90 minutes each.

Individuals in control group received non-NET psychosocial support in the interim that is provided to SGBV survivors as part of the Great Lakes SGBV project and will then receive NET after endline data has been collected.