Post-Piracy Care for Seafarers – New Study

A sign of the times?

The Seamen’s Church Institute (SCI) has recently published Preliminary Guidelines: Post-Piracy Care for Seafarers, meant to provide a general structure for the care of seafarers following an incident of piracy and are preliminary to an ongoing study designed to develop more specific recommendations forthcoming in the second half of 2010. The information withink the Preliminary Guidelines is culled from a variety of sources in the professional mental health literature.

About the Piracy Trauma Study:

In conjunction with the Disaster Psychiatry Outreach (DPO) at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Seamen’s Church Institute has developed a multi-year project exploring the clinical assessment and treatment of piracy attack survivors. SCI’s study of the impact of piracy on seafarers and their families is the first of its kind in the maritime industry.

SCI’s program seeks to identify unique stressors of piracy hostage situations, along with immediate and ongoing medical evaluation strategies for crewmembers and their families. Study outcomes include plans for clinically assessing seafarers after piracy incidents, assisting families during prolonged piracy episodes, and triaging short- and long-term mental health treatment.

SCI will update the Preliminary Guidelines, available online at http://www.seamenschurch.org/law-advocacy/piracy-trauma-study and welcomes comments from interested parties in their ongoing efforts to develop specific guidelines to address the mental health impact of piracy on seafarers.

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