The critical role first aid responders, relief workers, and other medical personnel play in crisis and disaster settings cannot be understated. Especially in conflict areas, medical personnel face numerous threats to their security and physical well-being, putting them at risk of developing psychiatric symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Because lay medics frequently function as the primary health providers in low-resource conflict situations, their mental health is crucial to the delivery of services to afflicted populations. In this chapter we examine the experiences of community health workers who serve displaced and war-affected populations in Karen State, eastern Burma. The evidence presented is based on the authors' previous qualitative research with this population. Though it is impossible to neatly deconstruct the myriad experiences of suffering, perseverance, and survivorship intrinsic to these medics' lives into the academic frameworks of psychology and psychiatry, an attempt at finding patterns in their narratives that parallel concepts in mental health literature may be helpful in developing evidence-based interventions. Incongruities are implicit in generalizations, and constant awareness of cultural relativism among widely different societal and linguistic norms must be maintained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)