We support children to cope with the effects of conflict, build resilience and feel more in control of their lives.
Conflict can leave children with invisible wounds that affect their wellbeing, development and future. Displacement, violence and loss can lead to anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and other mental health issues.
For example, a survey from Gaza in 2024 showed that 96% of children felt death was imminent, and nearly half believed they will die because of the war.
Yet more than 90% of children in conflict-affected areas who need mental health support don’t receive it, often due to limited services, stigma around mental health, and a lack of support for caregivers.
Without support, the effects of conflict can shape children’s wellbeing, development, relationships and ability to imagine a future. Unaddressed trauma can also be passed between generations, making mental health support essential for children to recover and thrive.
Over 90% of children in conflict-affected areas who need mental health care don’t receive it.
I was worried all the time before coming to Uganda because of what was happening in my country.
Mental health and psychosocial support for children in conflict requires working across the entire environment that surrounds a child - with families and in schools and communities - in order to recognise mental health and wellbeing concerns early and respond to it well.
We support caregivers and teachers, who are often the first to notice distress but the least equipped to respond to it. We work directly with children and adolescents to build the emotional skills that formal support systems frequently fail to provide.
We strengthen the ability of communities to detect mental health needs early. And we tackle the stigma that keeps families from seeking help in the first place.
Strengthening parent wellbeing and skills
Supporting adolescent mental health
Mental health needs detection tool
Child-centred stigma reduction
Whole-family psychosocial support
Play and movement-based psychosocial support
Ensuring quality mental health support
Nothing happens in isolation. All of our methodologies are designed to integrate with our child protection and education Care Systems. Each can be tailored to the specific context you are working in.
Every child deserves support, the chance to be heard, and a future they can look to with hope. The Beyond Trauma consortium is providing evidence-based psychosocial and mental health support to children and young people affected by the war in Ukraine.
Strategies to promote mental health care help-seeking among children are needed, especially in lowincome and middle-income countries and in complex settings. The aim of this trial was to compare a vignette-based, community-level, proactive case detection tool (CCDT) against standard awareness raising for promoting mental health help-seeking among children and adolescents.
Uganda remains Africa’s largest refugee host country, sheltering over 2,000,000 refugees and asylum seekers as of September 2026. As these vulnerable communities continue to grow, the critical services needed to support them are experiencing severe funding shortages.
Although psychosocial interventions delivered by non-specialist providers effectively treat common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety, the treatment-specific elements driving their efficacy remain largely unknown. Our aim was to compare and rank the efficacy of the individual active components of task-shared psychosocial interventions and to predict efficacy using individual participant characteristics.
Adolescent involvement in mental health prevention research remains limited in low-resource settings. This study examined the feasibility, acceptability, processes and perceived impacts of adolescent advisory groups (AAGs) within the ALIVE research in Colombia, Nepal and South Africa.
More than 1,000 days of violence, displacement and fear in the West Bank, and almost no international attention. War Child's NGO partners discuss the devastating impact on children.
