Gadjah Mada University
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
July 28–31, 2004

The fourth FPR Workshop took place on July 28–31, 2004, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The event was co-sponsored by the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard University, and the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Gadjah Mada University. The purpose of the meeting was a training workshop for Indonesian professionals.

In recent decades, the language of “trauma” has been applied internationally to a broad range of social, political, and psychological phenomena. While psychiatrists and psychologists have often focused on individual clinical phenomena associated with domestic abuse, political violence, or disasters, the term trauma also can describe broader issues of violence and reconciliation, human rights, and social suffering. The FPR’s first overseas workshop sought to address some of these broader issues. The event was also intended to facilitate more collaboration between Indonesian and American clinicians and researchers, all working with patients and communities that were suffering the effects of social and political violence.

The workshop took place five months prior to a tsunami that struck off the coast of Aceh province, killing 230,000 people in eleven countries. As a consequence of that event, in February 2005, during the “Four Dimensions of Childhood” conference, the FPR reconvened a keynote panel of some of the same Indonesian psychiatrists and mental health practitioners and U.S. scientists and psychiatrists who had attended the 2004 workshop in order to address the implications of the tsunami for Indonesian children and families. A paper summarizing the panel’s recommendations for international mental health workers was circulated in the United States and Indonesia.