Learning the lessons of Hiroshima for clinical psychology training and practice

This paper is a collaborative article by trainees and lecturers of the DCP programme at the University of Essex, written following a thematic day featuring five peace workers from the 8th River Hiroshima Group, who shared personal narratives and reflections on the 1945 Hiroshima bombing. The cultural exchange and dialogue that took place enabled trainees to have a deepened understanding of the experience of people on the other side of a global conflict and to have their Western assumptions about the war challenged. They also learnt about the function of testimony in memorialising traumatic events, in a way that challenges dominant discourses about trauma. The implications of taking of an explicitly internationalist perspective in clinical training is discussed in the context of the new training guidelines.