Refugee and non-refugee migrant youths may carry a double burden of past adversities and post-migration stress while trying to continue schooling and adapt to their new social and cultural environment. Executive functioning skills are central to learning and navigating in the new context. Knowledge of how young migrants' executive functioning is associated with stressful factors and positive or potentially protective factors, could contribute to understanding and possibly finding ways to support these young learners.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur J Psychotraumatol
October 2024
Research shows that adult refugees' well-being and future in the reception country heavily depend on successfully learning the host language. However, we know little about how adult learners from refugee backgrounds experience the impact of trauma and adversity on their learning. The current study aims to investigate the perspectives of adult refugee learners on whether and how trauma and other adversity affect their learning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHigh levels of post-traumatic stress are well documented among refugees. Yet, refugee adolescents display high heterogeneity in their type of trauma and symptom levels. Following the recurrent plea for validated trauma screening tools, this study investigated the psychometric properties of the Children's Revised Impact of Event Scale (CRIES-8) among refugee adolescents from Afghanistan ( = 148), Syria ( = 234), and Somalia ( = 175) living in Europe.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychosoc Interv
August 2023
School-based psychosocial interventions are increasingly put forward as a way to support young refugees' and migrants' well-being and mental health in resettlement. However, the evidence on these interventions' effectiveness remains scarce and scholars denounce particular gaps in the evidence to date, pointing to a lack of large-scale, controlled studies and studies including social outcome measures. This cluster randomized study aims to strengthen the evidence base on school-based psychosocial interventions for refugee and migrant youth by assessing the effect of two interventions, Classroom Drama and Welcome to School, on youth's mental health, resilience, and social relations in Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and the United Kingdom.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Rorschach and self-report instruments represent methodologically different types of assessment, which together may yield incremental information about the test-taker. There is little evidence on whether and when results from these methods converge.
Objective: To examine possible convergences between Rorschach trauma-related personality variables and self-reported variables.
Trauma-affected refugee patients benefit from psychological treatment to different degrees. Only a handful of studies has investigated potential predictors of treatment outcome that could throw light on the great variability in outcomes reported for this group. Such knowledge may be vital to better tailor prevention and treatment efforts to the needs of different individuals and subgroups among these patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile scholarly literature indicates that both refugee and non-refugee migrant young people display increased levels of psychosocial vulnerability, studies comparing the mental health of the two groups remain scarce. This study aims to further the existing evidence by examining refugee and non-refugee migrants' mental health, in relation to their migration history and resettlement conditions. The mental health of 883 refugee and 483 non-refugee migrants (mean age 15.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis pre- and posttreatment study of 22 severely traumatized adult refugees spanned a mean of 6.5 years. Changes in personality functioning, mental health, and well-being were examined using the Rorschach Performance Assessment System, Harvard Trauma Questionnaire, Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25, and the World Health Organization's Quality of Life-BREF questionnaire.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRefugee patients with severe traumatic experiences may need mental health treatment, but treatment results vary, and there is scarcity of studies demonstrating refugees' long-term health and well-being after treatment. In a 10-year naturalistic and longitudinal study, 54 multi-origin traumatized adult refugee patients, with a background of war and persecution, and with a mean stay in Norway of 10.5 years, were recruited as they entered psychological treatment in mental health specialist services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResponse to mental health treatment varies highly among refugee patients. Research has not established which factors relate to differences in outcome. This study is a follow-up of Opaas and Hartmann's (2013) Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM; Exner, 2003) pretreatment study of traumatized refugees, where 2 RIM principal components, Trauma Response and Reality Testing, were found descriptive of participants' trauma-related personality functioning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdverse and potentially traumatic experiences (PTEs) in childhood were examined among 54 adult refugee patients with pre-flight PTEs of war and human rights violations (HRVs) and related to mental health and quality of life at treatment start. Extent of childhood PTEs was more strongly related to mental health and quality of life than the extent of war and HRV experiences. Childhood PTEs were significantly related to arousal and avoidance symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and to quality of life, whereas pre-flight war and HRV experiences were significantly related to reexperiencing symptoms of PTSD only.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFifty-one multitraumatized mental health patients with refugee backgrounds completed the Rorschach (Meyer & Viglione, 2008), Harvard Trauma Questionnaire, and Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25 (Mollica, McDonald, Massagli, & Silove, 2004), and the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF questionnaire (WHOQOL Group, 1998) before the start of treatment. The purpose was to gain more in-depth knowledge of an understudied patient group and to provide a prospective basis for later analyses of treatment outcome. Factor analysis of trauma-related Rorschach variables gave 2 components explaining 60% of the variance; the first was interpreted as trauma-related flooding versus constriction and the second as adequate versus impaired reality testing.
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