Gaza Community Mental Health Programme — the Palestinian clinical record

The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme is the oldest continuously working Palestinian mental health institution in the Gaza Strip, and the reason there is a Palestinian clinical record of the last thirty-five years at all rather than only a foreign one. Its own account of itself is plain: “GCMHP was established in 1990 by the renowned Palestinian psychiatrist and human rights defender, Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, as an independent, non-governmental, and non-profit Palestinian organization.”

It works through community centres rather than a hospital. As its site describes the arrangement, GCMHP “delivers its services through three community centers located in Gaza City, Deir El-Balah, and Khan Younis”, staffed by “psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, rehabilitation and occupational therapists, pharmacists, and medical secretaries”, providing “consultations, psychotherapy, and occupational therapy”. Its stated mission is to deliver “trauma-informed mental health services to the Palestinian community in the Gaza Strip, mitigating collective trauma and fostering healing and resilience”. The word it reaches for is collective, not individual, and that choice runs through the whole Palestinian literature on this subject.

The organisation is also a research body, and its data appears in the peer-reviewed record. Research it carried out with Physicians for Human Rights among women in Gaza found that “47.6% showed signs of severe psychological distress and 80.9% demonstrated signs of anxiety” — a figure cited by a 2024 commentary in BMJ Global Health whose co-authors include Dr Yasser Abu-Jamei of GCMHP, alongside researchers at Birzeit University’s Institute of Community and Public Health. That commentary also reported that by 2024 “all six Community Mental Health Centres ran out of medications and were forced to close, and the only existing inpatient psychiatric hospital was shelled and can no longer function.” A note on the arithmetic: GCMHP’s own site currently describes three of its centres, and the BMJ Global Health count of six refers to the community mental health centres in the Strip as a whole. The sources are not counting the same thing, and this archive does not know from these two documents alone how the sets overlap.

Its founder was born in Bir al-Saba’ in 1944 and was made a refugee in Gaza in 1948 — the Nakba is in the biography of the man who built the Strip’s mental health system, not only in his caseload. Al Jazeera reported his death on 17 December 2013, at seventy, after a long illness; he had won the Martin Ennals Award for human rights defenders in 1998 and the Olof Palme Prize in 2010. Husam El-Nounou, GCMHP’s head of administration, told Al Jazeera: “He is considered the father of mental health and the pioneer of mental health in Palestine.”

Why it matters

• Thirty-five years of clinical observation in Gaza held by a Palestinian institution, not compiled from outside during an emergency.
• Its framing — collective trauma, community centres, trauma-informed care rather than an imported diagnostic checklist — is the position most Palestinian clinicians take, and it predates the current war by decades.
• Its own figures are citable in the peer-reviewed literature, which is what makes them usable against a hostile reader.

Key resources

• GCMHP — About Us
• Unbearable suffering: mental health consequences of the October 2023 Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip — BMJ Global Health, 30 September 2024
• Gaza mental health pioneer dies aged 70 — Al Jazeera, 18 December 2013