Self-care and wellness practices of helping professionals in context of war and conflict: Western worldview and African worldview lessons learnt from a scoping literature review

Abstract

The poster draws from a field-based study focusing on the self-care and wellness practices of helping professionals in the context of the insecurity crisis in Burkina Faso. Using scoping literature review as a literature review methodology, our poster highlights our first-hand findings on Western and African Worldview’s conceptualizations of self-care and wellness. It highlights how in Western literature, self-care and wellness are conceptualized as practices that remain in the domain of the individual, whereas African literature emphasizes the importance of cultural, communal, spiritual, and relational perspectives of self-care and wellness. It examines how the practices apply to helping professionals working in a distress context, specifically in Burkina Faso, where exposure to constant stress, insecurity, and social services provision to internally displaced people heightens the need for sustainable self-care and wellness strategies that foster resilience. It concludes that meaningful self-care and wellness frameworks must move beyond dominant Western worldviews and intentionally incorporate culturally centered approaches to support helping professionals whose daily practices are occurring in distress or conflict settings.