Mental health in refugee children and youth

Abstract

This chapter aims at understanding the emotional burden of conflict and displacement on refugee children and adolescents by examining evidence provided by mental health research and service delivery. Within this specific study area, mental health research has been focused on, measuring psychological distress among refugee youth by identifying both risk and protective factors that have an impact on their psychological health. Therefore, a number of systematic reviews on epidemiological studies have been conducted to investigate the prevalence estimates of psychological distress in child and youth refugees (Rousseau, 1995; Fazel & Stein, 2002; Lustig et al., 2004; Attanayake et al., 2009; Bronstein & Montgomery, 2011), whereas other studies have provided reviews of individual, family, community and societal risk and protective factors affecting the mental health of children and adolescents who are forcibly displaced to low-, middle- (Reed, Fazel, Jones, & Panter-Brick, 2012) and high-income countries (Fazel, Reed, Panter-Brick, & Stein, 2012). This chapter is structured as follows: a) a brief report on the evidence concerning the levels of psychological distress among refugee children and youth drawing on key literature studies; b) an examination of processes contributing to resilient mental health outcomes in children affected by armed conflict; and c) the role of interventions both in terms of prevention and treatment of psychological distress (Pacione, Measham, & Rousseau, 2013).