Cambridge Public Health member Eolene Boyd-MacMillan discusses refugee and asylum seekers’ mental health on BJPsych Open podcast.
The podcast, which also features Derrick Silove and Maja Bruhn Kristiansen, examines the journal’s themed series on Refugee and Asylum Mental Health, highlighting the mental health challenges faced by asylum seekers and refugees and underlining the need for a comprehensive response.
In the podcast, Eolene highlights the importance of cultural sensitivity when considering people’s migration experiences, and the models and frameworks that can be used to assess and develop mental health support for refugees.
She highlights the IC-ADAPT model that integrates two eco-psychosocial models: integrative complexity, an interactionist cognitive processing model that focuses on the intersection of environmental, psychological, and functional complexity; and, ADAPT, a model developed for and with refugees to increase understanding and bring coherence to their lived experiences of societal functioning, disruption and breakage due to conflict, climate change or other.
Together, the IC-ADAPT model can enable those who provide support, and those who have left or continue to live in adverse conditions, to identify, strengthen and augment mental health and psychosocial resources, and tofind a way forward.
Link to the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/bjpsych/bjpo-refugee-and-asylum-mental-health
More information about the IC-ADAPT Consortium: https://www.psychiatry.cam.ac.uk/groups/ic-adapt-consortium/