Webinar shares lessons from community mental health support for refugees

On 20th June – World Refugee Day – we held a webinar entitled: Enabling Resilience: Lessons from Community Mental Health Support for Syrian Refugees.

This was the first in the series of our Enabling Resilience: Mental Health Practice in Refugee Communities events, which is our event programme for and on mental health. It brings together participants from refugee backgrounds, academia, service provision, and policymaking to collaborate and discuss policy and practice in mental health services for refugee communities in order to learn and to foster better services and practices.

For this launch event, we brought together two specialists who have worked with Syrian refugees to share their experiences in developing a culturally sensitive approach to therapeutic engagement when training refugees to deliver mental health programming.

They explored:

1. Their methods in developing programmes for community mental health, including training refugees to implement mental health programmes.
2. Power dynamics between people who train and people who are trained.
3. Whether a Western-cultural bias needs to be thought about when working with non-white, non-European refugees in therapeutic engagement and how the discourse shaped their work with Syrian people.

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