alumni profile
by minne hong ho
Social Worker of the Year Megan Berthold and the
Program for Torture Victims As a UCLA doctoral student in social welfare in the 1990s, Megan Berthold made a series of connections in Los Angeles that literally changed the course of her life’s work. “I was in the doctoral program at UCLA and was doing my dissertation with Cambodian refugees,” she recalls, “and doing a study on the impact of torture and a whole host of traumas on Cambodian adolescents refugees and their parents, when I was invited by a colleague to the home of Ana Deutsch, who we had heard was doing a lot of work with survivors of torture.” Ana Deutsch, a psychoanalyst from Argentina who had escaped during the country’s “dirty war,” and colleague Jose Quiroga, a physician who survived the brutal Pinochet regime in his native Chile, had both fled their homelands during state-sponsored torture and had worked with other survivors of torture in their home countries. After immigrating to the U.S., they had continued their counseling work, started a volunteer network, and eventually were asked by Amnesty International to document the evidence of torture of the survivor population. That single night of introductions was the starting point for an enormously successful collaboration, leading to Berthold’s long-term involvement with the Program for Torture Victims (PTV), a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that provides services to more than 300 survivors from over 65 countries annually. >>