Integrating Mental Health Into Support for Refugees

With Julia Pettengill The Schooner Foundation

TRANSCRIPT

CMHI: Refugees — or we like to call them, people on the move — are not just fleeing war, climate crisis, and collapse. They’re navigating systems that often perpetuate harm. This can be prolonged asylum processes, chronic uncertainty, bureaucratic forms of dehumanization. And in far too many settings, mental health remains an afterthought, sidelined by humanitarian responses that prioritize survival over restoration.

Julia Pettengill: And I want to just zoom in on a powerful counter-example which comes from one of our partners, Amna. They are formally the Refugee Trauma Initiative.

So in northern Greece, their Baytna centers — meaning ‘our home’ in Arabic — create healing, culturally grounded spaces for refugee children and caregivers.

And, you know, it's important to understand that these aren't medicalized clinics. They’re not white coats. Instead, trained community facilitators, many of them displaced themselves, offer storytelling and music and play and consistent presence. And I remember hearing about a group of young Syrian boys who arrived at one of the centers, and they were really silent and withdrawn. And over time, through this relational engagement and these tools, they really began to play again.

They were smiling and speaking and laughing. And, you know, that transformation was the product of trust and safety and belonging. And we need to recognize this for what it is: expertise. This lived experience, this relational intelligence and cultural fluency. And if we're committed to building systems that support refugee well-being, we have to center these forms of knowledge — not just as supplemental, but really as foundational.