How we can bring about mental health support to refugees – Essam Daod-

Essam Daod shares a story of one way we can bring brief, important support to refugees at critical times.

And also offers us a window of insight into how any of us might support any other of us midst potentially traumatising experiences in ways that enable us to emerge not traumatised but potentially stronger.

There is much guff ‘n’ gumph and self-agrandising bluster about, professing to be “trauma informed” but much is not really informed at all. Trauma is not the events we endure but the effect left within us from adverse experience of those events – so leaving us powerless, disconnected and dehumanized – and finding it difficult to feel safe in the world.
As Peter Levine puts it:

“Trauma is not what happens to us
but what we hold inside in absence of empathetic witnesses.”

Whether a person is left traumatised by an event has less to do with the event itself than how we experience it – and especially how we are treated by those around us after the event.

Essam Daod offers inspiration and insight into this with a simple story, one example and how a simple short human ‘intervention’ can change how we experience even the most trying and terrifying events in ways that enable us to come-through not unscathed but with some good chance we can emerge with resilience, strengthened and live fully our lives.

And he’s a psychiatrist too so he also offers hope for a profession so often seems to have sold it’s own by showing us an example of what it really means to work as a “soul healer”.

Link below- note that links to embed vids from TED.com tend not to embed properly, I’ll add it in when it goes up on on the TED youtube channel.

If it doesn’t embed right now on your browser then clicking the link will take you there.

https://embed.ted.com/talks/essam_daod_how_we_can_bring_mental_health_support_to_refugees

Essam Daod:

Transcript [available at TED.com in seven languages]

For the last two and a half years, I’m one of the few, if not the only, child psychiatrist operating in refugee camps, shorelines and rescue boats in Greece and the Mediterranean Sea. And I can say, with great confidence, that we are witnessing a mental-health catastrophe that will affect most of us, and it will change our world.

I live in Haifa, but nowadays, I spend most of my time abroad. During my time on the Greek island of Lesbos and on the rescue boats in the Mediterranean, thousands of refugee boats arrived to the shoreline, crowded with more than 1.5 million refugees.

One-fourth of them are children, fleeing war and hardship.

Each boat carries different sufferings and traumas from Syria, Iraq, Afganistan and different countries in Africa. In the last three years alone, more than 12,000 refugees lost their lives. And hundreds of thousands lost their souls and their mental health due to this cruel and traumatic experience.

I want to tell you about Omar, a five-year-old Syrian refugee boy who arrived to the shore on Lesbos on a crowded rubber boat. Crying, frightened, unable to understand what’s happening to him, he was right on the verge of developing a new trauma. I knew right away that this was a golden hour, a short period of time in which I could change his story, I could change the story that he would tell himself for the rest of his life. I could reframe his memories. I quickly held out my hands and said to his shaking mother in Arabic,