Psychological consequences of war-traumatized children and adolescents in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Research into the psychosocial consequences of war and politicalviolence on children’s and adolescent’s developmental wellbeing hasshown a steady increase over the last decades. Numerous studies, fromdiffering cultures in different war zones around the world, have documentedthe effect on children of exposure to war atrocities. The war inBosnia and Herzegovina (BH) 1992-1995, at the end of 20th centuryfound the citizens of BH and the world mental health professionalsand scientists unprepared to deal with the adverse consequences forthe entire BH population and especially for its most vulnerable part,children and adolescents, to be able to take adequate measures of sufficientmental health care to prevent devastating consequences of severemultiple traumas. Only a few research studies were done during andafter this war in BH, the United States, Sweden, Norway, the UK andGermany focusing on the relationship between war trauma, Posttraumaticstress disorder (PTSD), depression, suicidal thoughts, acculturation,repatriation, poverty, behavioral problems, school adjustment,relational problems of children and their mothers after deploymentof war PTSD veterans and war prisoners, and treatment of psychologicalconsequences in examined children and adolescents from BH.The major part of this paper reviewed available literature on Medlinethat reported national and international studies which investigated thepsychological consequences of war on BH children and adolescentsand several papers about children and adolescents from Srebrenica,that were not indexed on Medline, but showed very crucial results forthe issue described.