Refugees

Psychological Needs

Meeting critical basic human needs for food, shelter, clothing, and medicine are essential first steps in caring for dislocated refugees. Once the basic survival needs are met, it is important to attend to short- and long-term psychological needs that relate to issues such as loss of family, friends, homes, communities, employment, and personal belongings; starvation; near death; rape and sexual abuse; physical and psychological violence; abuse; torture and injury; and witnessing of murder and violations of family, friends, and strangers in their home country or during their escape.

These experiences may cause serious mental health problems that can be further complicated during postmigration adjustment. As refugees attempt to navigate their adjustments to new life transitions and circumstances, they must come to terms with past trauma. The combination of premigration trauma with the barriers, severity, and complexity of postmigration resettlement has been found to result in serious psychological problems for some refugees.

To effectively provide mental health services to refugees, it is essential to address the refugee experience while giving attention to the broad spectrum, diversity, and differences in refugee cultures. This requires significant cross-cultural sensitivity and culturally relevant psychological interventions, requiring mental health professionals to be attuned to multicultural issues.

The Unique Refugee Experience and Implications for Mental Health Interventions

It has been clearly documented that the problem of forced displacement presents difficult, distinctive, and deep-rooted psychological problems that are specific to the refugee population. Premigration factors have been found to be a major predictor of psychological problems, such as culture shock and fatigue, acculturative stress, and the effects of political victimization and repression. Common features of these factors are the multiple losses of family, friends, and one's own culture, often accompanied by a psychological mourning for one's past life. Therefore, refugees may actually experience retraumatization during resettlement because of the combination of the pain, suffering, and sadness over the losses, transitions, and traumatic events of the past with the need to adapt to a new culture. Mental health professionals will need to address these multifaceted and complex issues, which comprise historical, social, political, cultural, psychological, and economic variables.

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