Rathakrishnan Sivaneswararajah

Shanthiham is a nonprofit, Non-Government Organization, provides services from northern part of Sri Lanka.

The need for an institution to deal with trauma victims saw the establishment of the Association for Health and Counselling (AHC) popularly known as Shanthiham in 1988. Since then Shanthiham has developed as an organisation that provides both a Counselling Centre and Training Centre in Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) for the Northern region.

Shanthiham is dedicated to improving the community wellbeing of individuals, families and communities in the northern region, especially it recently ran two programs to support the victims of conflict. Trauma Program especially for the victims of conflict with the support of The Asia Foundation and Accompaniers Program - working with the families with disappeared members with the support of ICRC.

Shanthiham works at providing psychosocial services to trauma and severe trauma affected groups through community based psychosocial interventions and capacity building training front-line social workers.
Shanthiham also provides training in mental health to government, non-government carder and community workers. At present it is involved in preparing the Standard Operating Procedures in SGBV Case Management with the stakeholders with the support of SDC. Another program that works with the Single Headed Household to empower the families to deal with the power imbalance and work with the partner organizations ZOA, FOSDO and Viluthu to encourage women political leadership, sustainable economic development and reducing GBV funded by EU through EIDHR Program.

The uniqueness of Shanthiham's intervention is to create Core Groups - a self-empowered community volunteers group which helps to handle the Mental Health and Psychosocial issues in their communities, dealing with the issues with positive manner, collaborate with community groups, refer the needy people to service providers; for example, mental health services from Government hospitals and SGBV and Children issues to local divisional and district officials, and to organizations who provide counselling and livelihood support.
Over the years, Shanthiham has been involved in research activities on MHPSS. Some of the areas research have included effectiveness of counselling in the Tamil context, class room based interventions, training of trainers approach, MHPS effects of disappearances, MHPS effects of torture, effectiveness of MHPS interventions, cultural idioms of distress, cultural relaxation practices and Tamil traditional MHPS practices. It was the chair of the MHPS response to the Tsunami recovery in Jaffna and has been deeply involved in providing MHPSS during the protracted conflict period. Thus Shanthiham is uniquely placed to be the lead organization to research the effectiveness of MPHSS in this region.