Empowerly

Student profile

She looked like me.

Maybe it was my imagination, or perhaps a trick of the light, but for a fleeting instance, the sight of her gap-toothed smile triggered something in my memory. I blinked, and the wave of inexplicable recognition, like a half-remembered dream, faded from a roar to a murmur.

I turned to my mother, and asked, “Who was that student of yours, the little girl with the curly hair? I’ve never seen her before.”

“Curly hair? Oh, you mean Touleen? She moved to my class this year,” my mother replied distractedly, eyes still trained on the tree-lined road.

“Moved? Where from?”

“Syria.”

Silence.

“Syria? They fled?” I asked disbelievingly.

“Touleen is your friend Tahla’s cousin, and it was in part because Tahla’s family was already here that Touleen and her family were granted entrance into the United States.”

The silence stretched out, filling the air. I didn’t try to break it.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, there are currently 25.4 million individuals who were driven from their countries due to persecution, war, and violence. While their outward suffering has garnered international attention, a refugee mental health crisis persists unnoticed and unaddressed. As someone striving to create intersectional solutions to public health issues, the refugee crisis embodies social inequities I plan to use my education to dismantle. 

Many refugees cannot access asylum, and languish for years in inhumanely overcrowded and under-resourced camps. If granted asylum, refugees are often barred from legal work, forcing them into unregulated working conditions where they’re extremely vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. 

Programs addressing these issues typically focus on financial self-empowerment; for example, Ugandan refugee policy provides access to legal employment and public services, enabling refugees to secure financial stability and independence. While establishing stability is critical to aiding displaced and refugee populations, the profound psychological scars of war remain unaddressed. Hoping refugees can cope with such trauma completely unaided is wishful thinking at best, and may actually impede the efficacy of existing policies intended to aid them.

Even with access to sufficient resources, mental illness can at times be completely incapacitating. Failing to address or provide accommodations for the frequently debilitating symptoms of mental illness in refugee populations renders such populations helpless and hopeless that their conditions will improve, as they are unable to take steps towards normalcy due to the severity of their symptoms. For many survivors, the war hasn’t ended; the battlefield has only shifted from their external world to their internal one. A Syrian-American medical organization reported cases of post-traumatic stress disorder in Syrian refugee children to be so severe that they proposed it be renamed “human devastation syndrome,” which is especially significant given over 53% of Syrian refugees are under the age of 18. While I am told my life is about to really begin, adolescents my age are trying to rebuild theirs. 

As a Pakistani-American and a member of the Muslim community, the many shared cultural and linguistic elements as well as personal connections to a number of refugees emphasize the similarities between myself and these individuals. If I had been born on the other side of a border, if my own luck had been different, I could have been another statistic in their ranks. Refugees are hardly a world away; they are neighbors, friends, brothers and sisters. The lack of empathy in broader society is a reminder of how nationalist western governments treat people like me when they are stripped of economic and geographic privilege.

Barriers to aiding refugees in recovery are numerous, and there is no perfect solution. Factors including insufficient funding, communication or language barriers, cultural beliefs about the cause and treatment of mental illness, further impede relief efforts. Effectively addressing this issue will require a global shift in intersectional aid approaches and in human empathy, a shift I hope to be part of.