Free Essay on Social Workers Helping Refugees Transition

Research Question: How can social healthcare help Syrian refugees recover from trauma or mental disorders during the transition into a new country urban environment?

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

Looking at the contemporary refugee crisis, post-traumatic stress disorder is a major mental health problem. The refugees are suffering from depression, anxiety, hunger, and starvation, joblessness, and misery as a result of their losses and the anxiety associated with the inability to transition from their previous lifestyle and social environment to a totally new environment as refugees. Displacement from their former stable home environment to a new environment as an asylum seeker has a significant impact on the self-esteem and the trauma, as well as stress, requires that the refugees should be accorded the holistic care. The social health workers have the potential of helping the refugee's transition smoothly by providing support using the ecological model of the social health work. Additionally, the social health workers can administer structured social and psychotherapy to help the refugee with their range of traumatic stress responses whether the setting is low resources or rich resource settings. Social and psychotherapeutic intervention covers practices such as cognitive behavioral therapy based on the evidence-based practices model as it has been proven to be effective in helping people overcome depression, stress and anxiety associated with such traumatic experiences such as war and transitioning into the new environment. Social workers can provide more than social intervention as they can administer social-educational and community-based refugee interventions. These interventions would help in facilitating personal community growth among the refugees. The social workers can work with the asylum seekers of various backgrounds throughout the stages of their resettlement.

There are also a number of techniques that can be employed by the social care workers. For example, positive psycho-education has been the most recommended technique for helping refugees of all age groups transition into the new urban community. Never the less, instruction techniques and positive self-talk have been combined by many practitioners and recommended by researchers to be effective in overcoming anxiety and social phobias. Social mental health workers can also help the refugees overcome depression from the loss of economic opportunities by educating them and encouraging them of better opportunities to come. The breakdown of cultural identity, loss of social and familial structures, interruption of schooling, and an increase in poverty levels affect the refugees and this can hamper their transition. Social workers trained on mental health problems can help the employees overcome such problems through art or music therapy. Finally, AMDR Therapy would be administered on the refugees who appear to be more affected the others especially the vulnerable refugees such as children, women and the elderly. Loss of relatives and property can be devastating to the hardworking individuals, but it is important to note that eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is one of tube most used evidence-based therapies for psychological stress and treating Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

References

Deng, F. 1999. "Introduction. Internal Displacement In Africa: An Overview Of The Crisis And The International Response". Refugee Survey Quarterly 18 (1): 1-8. doi:10.1093/rsq/18.1.1.

Donnelly, Tam Truong, Jihye Jasmine Hwang, Dave Este, Carol Ewashen, Carol Adair, and Michael Clinton. 2011. "If I Was Going To Kill Myself, I Wouldn't Be Calling You. I Am Asking For Help: Challenges Influencing Immigrant And Refugee Women's Mental Health". Issues In Mental Health Nursing 32 (5): 279-290. doi:10.3109/01612840.2010.550383.

Echeverri, C., J. Le Roy, B. Worku, and P. Ventevogel. 2018. "Mental Health Capacity Building In Refugee Primary Health Care Settings In Sub-Saharan Africa: Impact, Challenges, And Gaps". Global Mental Health 5. doi:10.1017/gmh.2018.19.

Eruyar, Seyda, Julia Huemer, and Panos Vostanis. 2017. "Review: How Should Child Mental Health Services Respond To The Refugee Crisis?". Child And Adolescent Mental Health21 (11). doi:10.1111/camh.12252.

Hunter, Philip. 2016. "The Refugee Crisis Challenges National Health Care Systems". EMBO Reports 17 (4): 492-495. doi:10.15252/embr.201642171.

Kupferschmidt, K. 2016. "Refugee Crisis Brings New Health Challenges". Science 352 (6284): 391-392. doi:10.1126/science.352.6284.391.

Morris, Demetrios, and Antonis Kousoulis. 2017. "Refugee Crisis In Greece: Healthcare And Integration As Current Challenges". Perspectives In Public Health 137 (6): 309-310. doi:10.1177/1757913917726019.

Muijen, M. 2016. "Overview Of European Refugee Mental Health Situation". European Psychiatry 33: S9. doi:10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.796.

Muijen, M. 2016. "Overview Of European Refugee Mental Health Situation". European Psychiatry 33: S9. doi:10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.796.

Pelosi, A.J., and O. Duhon. 1996. "Refugee Mental Health In Europe: An Overview Of Epidemiology And Treatment Interventions". European Psychiatry 11: 172s. doi:10.1016/0924-9338(96)88471-9.

Silove, Derrick, Peter Ventevogel, and Susan Rees. 2017. "The Contemporary Refugee Crisis: An Overview Of Mental Health Challenges". World Psychiatry 16 (2): 130-139. doi:10.1002/wps.20438.

Sundvall, Maria, David Titelman, and Sofie Baarnhielm. 2018. "Challenges Of Combining Perspectives". Crisis, 1-9. doi:10.1027/0227-5910/a000504.