4^th World Congress on
Psychiatry & Mental Health Nursing

Biography:

Dr. Daod is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist who grew up in Israel in a small Arab village in the Galilee. He specialized in child and adolescent psychiatry and graduated from psychoanalytic school. In 2015, he flew to Greece for a humanitarian rescue mission where he co-founded Humanity Crew and has been working with refugees ever since. Currently, he is an avid refugee mental health activist and researcher who has spoken in countless conferences and media outlets all over the world advocating for the importance of mental health support for refugees. In 2016 Essam and Humanity Crew were awarded "The Defenders of Refugee Rights Award" at the 4th Edition of Cities Defending Human Rights in Barcelona. In 2018, he became a WHO mental health expert team member, and a TED Fellow. 

Abstract:

More than 70 million refugees and asylum seekers are currently forcibly displaced from their homes due to civil war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and hunger. This mass forced displacement has created a global human rights crisis and a global public mental health epidemic. Indeed, tragically, forced displacement and migration, in addition to various post-migration stressors, has been linked to high rates of trauma- and stress-related mental health problems. Although rates of trauma- and stress-related mental health problems are elevated among refugees, only a small proportion of this population receives treatment, let alone interventions grounded in a strong evidence-base. This state of affairs stems in large part from a lack of resources and the complexity of providing treatment to large and diverse populations of refugees. These barriers to care and trauma recovery may, however, be made even worse by a lack of research that is specifically designed to guide the development of brief, effective, disseminable, easily implemented, and cost-effective mental health interventions tailored to these culturally and linguistically diverse, geographically dispersed and mobile populations. Building on knowledge to-date and years of field work, we propose that our understanding of refugee mental health, global public health and clinical research and intervention development, policy and related decision-making may be facilitated by refugee mental health framework that is built around: (a) the stage(s) of forced migration and (b) the psychological stage(s) or state-of-mind of forced migration. And thereby helps to characterize, (c) the (mal)adaptive movement or transition between these stages over time following forced migration and (d) key markers of resilience and vulnerability per stage. And in so doing, directly inform (e) assessment and respective intervention needs and decision-making, for individual refugees, as well as (f) research foci and questions that may be beneficial to improve the mental health of refugees and their children.