Between worrying about money, fretting about their jobs and worrying about their kids, most Americans consider their hectic lives very stressful.
But imagine the daily stress living on a continent where disease is rampant, natural disasters are common and poverty is the norm. What kind of toll does a life like that take on the human mind?
Oxford native Kevin Francies, son of Peter and Katee, is planning to find out during his three-week trip to the Republic of Ghana, located in West Africa. He left June 29.
The Ball State University graduate student, who’s working on his master’s degree in clinical psychology, is traveling with a team led by Professor Lucinda Woodward to study post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. Traumatic events that may trigger PTSD include violent personal assaults, natural or human-caused disasters, accidents or military combat.
Francies and the team will be interviewing locals suffering from PTSD to see how natural disasters such as floods, droughts and fires have affected them and how their mental conditions compare to people who have lived in neighboring war-torn nations such as Liberia and the Ivory Coast.
‘We’re trying to find a baseline for the levels of post-traumatic stress disorder in Western Africa,? he said. ‘We want to see what happens in a country without war.
Ghana’s been relatively peaceful for 50 years. It’s home to thousands of former child soldiers who fled from war-torn Liberia, which suffered a 10-year civil war that displaced nearly a million people.
Francies hopes the experience and insights he gains from this trip will help further his own research into using on-line virtual world technology to treat people who suffer from PTSD, but ‘live too far away to have access to adequate mental health resources.?
Utilizing a virtual office, web cameras and virtually-constructed environments for treatment, Francies hopes to one day help everyone from folks living in remote rural communities to people suffering in disaster areas.
‘After Hurricane Katrina, there was a big need for mental health services and only a few could actually go,? he said.