Refugees and asylum seekers experience huge and varying amounts of psychological stress before and during and after their journey to settle into a host country. This can seriously impact their mental health. This podcast is about a project that is focused on psychological interventions for preventing the onset of mental disorders in refugees and asylum seekers once they reach a host country. It uses an adaptation of a self-help tool called Self Help Plus developed by the world health organisation (WHO). The project is looking for adult Arabic speakers in Glasgow to train as facilitators. If you’re interested full contact details are in the podcast and they will be repeated at the end of this podcast and in the show notes.

To find out about the Re-Define project, I visited Strathclyde University where I met Dr Ross White and Mariana Popa.

Transcript

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K: I’m here with Dr Ross White and Mariana Popa also known as Mimi. You work for an EU funded project called RE-define. Can you tell us a little bit about it, please?

R: Yes. Re-define is a collaboration between academic institutions across 5 different EU countries. These countries are Italy, Germany, Austria, Finland and the UK and we also have a Turkish arm of the project as well. So the project is interested to evaluate a low-intensity psychosocial intervention aimed at helping to promote well-being and functioning in refugee and asylum-seeking populations.

So we are one of the sites for the EU countries and we are recruiting people in Glasgow.

K: So the outcome of this podcast might be a request for recruits?

R: That could be part of what we are about to do today yes.

K: So can you set the scene around the psychosocial psychological needs of refugees living in camps.

R: Maybe I can begin and I can pass over to Mimi just to help fill in the gaps and the stuff that I might miss. If we can think broadly of factors relating to the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers being across three different time periods. So if you think about the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers have before they start the migratory journey, they may be subject to torture, persecution, discrimination, ostracisation, being marginalized within their country of origin and their community of origin.

So we then have the migratory journey itself which can be traumatic for people and we know only too well from the sights and scenes that we’ve seen on the news in terms of some of the journeys, very traumatic and difficult journeys, that people embark on across the Mediterranean for example or across deserted areas or of sub-Saharan Africa.

So there’s also then the period of time that follows the arrival of the refugee or asylum seeker as they are initially, in the country that’s hosting them.

We know that the asylum process can be very stressful and we also know that the reception that people can sometimes get can prove challenging. There is a process of cultural adaptation and about acculturation in the host country. Then people are subject to ongoing uncertainty and precarity. They may be worried about family members who are distant from them now. They may have concerns about whether or not the Host country is going to offer them refugee status. So there’s a lot for people to be stressed and worried about and the need then for these forms of support to help boost mental health and wellbeing is so important.

Mimi, maybe you want to comment on some other factors that might impact on mental health?

M: Yes I think a lot of the research focuses on the traumatic factors pre-migration. So there’s not much going on about what happens after they arrive. Being a refugee or asylum seeker can have a profound impact on mental health.