Global Mental Health Webinar Series: Critical Cultural, and Practical Perspectives

Refugee mental health and mental health in humanitarian emergencies

Around 1% of the world population is forcedly displaced, including more than 20 million refugees under the mandate of UNHCR, the refugee agency of the United Nations. Refugees have increased mental health needs due to

1. Experiences they went through in the past,
2. Daily stresses of refugee life and the breakdown of supportive networks, and
3. Lack of prospects for the future and the loss of hope.

Most of the refugees live in low-income countries with limited resources for mental health care. The increased needs coupled with a lack of specialized resources has prompted humanitarian agencies to develop broad multi layered mental health responses that go beyond narrow clinical interventions.

Within global refugee mental health, three important emerging practices can be distinguished:

1. Community-based interventions to foster self-help and strengthen social connectedness;
2. Scalable psychological interventions (including brief psychotherapies) that can be delivered by non-specialists after brief training and with supportive supervision; and
3. Integration of mental health into general health care in refugee settings.

This webinar will provide examples of these practices, critically analyse them and attempt to distill what the work can learn from approaches that were born out of necessity.

Speaker: Peter Ventevogel, MD, PhD

Psychiatrist and medical anthropologist

Peter Ventevogel, MD, PHD, is a psychiatrist and a medical anthropologist. Since 2013 he is the Senior Mental Health Officer with UNHCR, the refugee agency of the United Nations. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Intervention, Journal for Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Conflict Affected Areas and worked with the nongovernmental organization HealthNet TPO. In 2016, he defended his doctoral dissertation ‘Borderlands of mental health: Explorations in medical anthropology, psychiatric epidemiology and health systems research in Afghanistan and Burundi.’

Moderator

Mónica Ruiz-Casares
PhD, MSc, MA, LLB
Associate Professor
Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry
McGill University

July 10, 2019

9:00-10:00 am (Montreal EDT)
Attendance: Online platform

Recordings

English | French | Arabic

Recommended readings

Silove, D., Ventevogel, P., & Rees, S. (2017). The contemporary refugee crisis: an overview of mental health challenges. World Psychiatry, 16(2), 130-139. doi:10.1002/wps.20438

Ventevogel, P., Jordans, M., Reis, R., & de Jong, J. (2013). Madness or sadness? Local concepts of mental illness in four conflict-affected African communities. Conflict and Health, 7(1), 3. doi:10.1186/1752-1505-7-3

Weissbecker, I., Hanna, F., El Shazly, M., Gao, J., & Ventevogel, P. (2019). Integrative Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Interventions for Refugees in Humanitarian Crisis Settings. In T. Wenzel & B. Drozdek (Eds.), Uncertain safety: Understanding and assisting the 21st century refugees (pp. 117-153). Cham: Springer.