After Fleeing War, Refugee Children Face Lasting Psychological Trauma
In the fall of 2015, Essam Daod was standing on the beach in Lesbos, Greece, when a crowded rubber dinghy packed with refugees landed ashore. Among them was an inconsolable five-year-old Syrian boy named Omar.
Daod took him from his mother and pointed at the police helicopter circling overhead: “It’s come to photograph you with big cameras because only the great and the powerful heroes like you can cross the sea!” Omar stopped crying. “Am I a hero?” he asked in Arabic. Assured he was, the boy agreed to show the stranger the boat he arrived in: “I will show you where I sat and how I stopped the waves with my hands, and how I protected everyone,” he boasted.
In that moment Daod, a Palestinian child psychiatrist, realized there was a way to reshape trauma as it happened. Soon after, his mental health organization, Humanity Crew, launched the “Heroes Project” to train rescue volunteers to rewrite the memories of the dangerous journey.
Last year, a Syrian-American medical organization announced that the severity of PTSD suffered by Syrian children surpassed the clinical definition and should be renamed “human devastation syndrome.” Mental health care for refugees is an invisible crisis that has remained on the backburner for NGOs and the international community. With little funding for treatment, the 1.5 million refugees who’ve arrived to Europe by sea since 2015 are largely left to grapple with psychological scars on their own.
In Lesbos, 8,000 refugees are trapped after a deal between Europe and Turkey cut off their route into the mainline in 2016. Since then, living conditions and prospects for a life in Europe have deteriorated. The largest camp, Moria, is at double capacity, and some inhabitants having been languishing there for years. A sense of hopelessness and unending detention has driven some to the brink—in May, one refugee set himself on fire outside an asylum office in the camp.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/refugee-mental-health-trauma-children-lesbos-greece-crisis-world-refugee-day-culture/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=Look_20180701::rid=594148660
