Viktorija Vrhovac's Contact Details

Viktorija Vrhovac's Company Details

Society for Psychological Assistance

Zagreb, City of Zagreb, Croatia • 5 Employees
Civic & Social Organization

The Society for Psychological Assistance, (SPA) is a non-profit, non-governmental mental health organization based in Zagreb, Croatia. Founded in 1993, it has extensive expertise in providing community-based psycho-social services and in training professional and non-professional care providers. The SPA has developed many different programs in the field of community-oriented psycho-social services, training and capacity building of psycho-social professionals. The main tasks of SPA are:providing assistance to individuals, families and communities in distress and exposed to traumatic experiences;research and training in the areas of psycho-social assistance;program development and evaluation.Since 2003, SPA operates the "Modus"- Child, Adolescent and Family Community Center in Zagreb serving about 700 clients per year. SPA has pioneered several innovative services that became integrated in governmental services as a standard. These include: psychological crisis interventions after major incidents affecting community (since 1995), clinical supervision in the national social services (since 2003), psychosocial treatment of perpetrators of domestic violence (since 2004).In the scope of our activities we are promoting humanistic values (e.g. gender equality, gender-sensitive psychosocial work, zero tolerance for domestic violence and treatment of perpetrators of violence, not just their punishment) as well as systemic, multi-dimensional and multi-treatment approaches to clients, arguing for non-authoritarian relationships between the counselor and the client (i.e. empowering clients in the counseling process) and the expansion and introduction to the public and third sector of such programs. Psychological crisis interventions, treatment of family violence perpetrators, supervision for psychosocial professionals are some of SPA's programs already accepted within the education and social welfare sectors in Croatia."Dragan Jusupović, Executive Director