Trauma in Urban Sierra Leone: Exploring Its Sociocultural, Historical, and Political Context

Cross-cultural research acknowledges culturally dependent ways of understanding, interpreting, and processing psychological trauma. Discourses about individual responses to traumatic events in low-income countries like crisis-ridden Sierra Leone ought to consider a person’s psychosocial background in a sociocultural, historical, and political context. As a sub-study of a research project in Sierra Leone, we chose a qualitative approach to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of trauma in the West African country. Semi-structured interviews with 20 Sierra Leonean students and 4 Sierra Leonean experts from trauma-related scientific fields were conducted in the capital Freetown. Our emic findings revealed unique culture-specific insights, such as a cultural notion of trauma belonging to life, collective efforts to “forgive and forget”—reinforced by the government after the civil war—as well as religious and interpersonal counseling, to have an impact on an individual’s response to trauma in Sierra Leone. While we found specific tendencies of sociocultural, historical, and political patterns on a macro-level, the participants’ statements sometimes had a different manifestation on the micro-level. Therefore, these patterns should rather be assessed from case to case for a thorough understanding of an individual’s response to trauma in a specific culture. This research highlights the benefit of emic, culture-sensitive approaches and encourages more comprehensive trauma discourses. Our findings confirm that the impact of trauma is not only related to a limited event but also shaped by a person’s psychosocial environment, which is influenced by society, culture, history, and politics.