The border town of Mae Sot in western Thailand is home to over one hundred thousand Burmese refugees escaping the upheaval of civil war in Burma. It is here that Dr. Cynthia Maung, herself fleeing from Burma's military junta's violent suppression of the 1988 pro-democracy movement, established a makeshift medical facility to treat the injuries sustained by fellow refugees. Over twenty years later, Dr. Cynthia's Mae Tao Clinic (MTC) has grown from a one-room building with only a rice cooker to sterilize instruments to a large community hospital providing healthcare to over 150,000 displaced people each year.
It is no surprise then that Mae Tao Clinic should house the cornerstone of BBP's adult mental health program: the Counseling Center. BBP provides counseling skills support and training, as well as individual and group supervision to the team of local counselors at the Counseling Center. The Counselors have a gained a high degree of expertise in dealing with the mental health and psychosocial problems presented by the Burmese refugees seeking treatment at Mae Tao Clinic. BBP provides monthly clinical skills training and case consultations with MTC Counselors on topics such as mental health and psychosocial problems (depression, anxiety, domestic violence, and alcoholism, for example); group facilitation skills for the Clinic Patient House emotional support group; psychotropic medication usage and monitoring; and various ways of supporting patients at MTC.
Supervision of MTC Counselors individually and as a group serves two purposes: to discuss caseloads of patients seeking counseling, as well as to process the counselors' own material and responses to the patients they care for. BBP's discussion-based approach to training and supervision validates each counselor's expertise and body of knowledge, building capacity toward the sustainability of mental health services at the Thai-Burma border.
Beyond the Mae Tao Clinic, BBP offers trainings to local community-based organization staff and associates in various mental health and psychosocial issues, counseling and coping skills, and psychological first aid. Coordination and collaboration with local organizations builds the capacity of both in-camp populations and out-of-camp refugee populations in Mae Sot to manage and respond to the mental health needs of their communities. Every year, BBP trains the Karen Women's Organization's caregivers for in-camp domestic violence safehouses and the Karen Department of Health and Welfare's “backpack medics,” who enter Burma for months at a time bringing basic healthcare to remote villages.
Laying the groundwork for knowledge and skills-building in the key areas of mental illness, psychosocial problems, and counseling and coping skills enables our partners to better respond to the problems they will likely encounter while caring for patients living in camps for internally displaced peoples in Burma as well as along the Thai-Burma border. Furthermore, BBP has organized a border-wide Mental Health Coordination Group to facilitate communication and collaboration among all parties active in the mental health and psychosocial fields, with the hopes of reducing redundancy and identifying critical service gaps.