PTSD, anxiety and depression higher in refugee children
Sameer tells Al Jazeera,“Scenes of those things which I witnessed had a very bad effect on me and still when I remember, it [makes] me upset.”
Research with refugee children finds the prevalence of emotional disorders to be generally higher than in non-refugee children.
According to one study, the overall prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was 23 percent (one in four) in refugee children, that of anxiety disorders was 16 percent (one in six) and that of depression was 14 percent (one in seven).
“One of the things about trauma is it keeps you on this very high state of alert,” says Trickey. “And I think those without refugee status, they’re living this constant fear of being returned to the place they fled.”
But not all children experience trauma the same way, Trickey adds.
“A more important risk factor, a predictor of PTSD, is not how big the event was, but it’s what you make of it. Were you afraid? Did you think someone was gonna die?
“And different children will find different things frightening. There’ll be some people that actually experience the most awful things and seem pretty unaffected, and they do OK. There’ll be some people that seem to be doing OK, and then they have, we can sometimes call it, latent vulnerability. And later on in life, that’s when they develop difficulties.”
Ventevogel tells Al Jazeera that often, in younger children, there may be more issues with withdrawal, because they cannot verbalise how they feel, for example where “a child withdraws, stops playing with other children, or a child shows in play, in the way the child enacts issues, that there is something not OK.
“It’s not diagnostic, but this can be an indication that there is something deeper,” Ventevogel says.
Trickey explains that during a trauma-focused therapy session, a boy he was working with described what he was going through by comparing his brain to a wastepaper bin stuffed with “scrunched-up pieces of paper” that represent “all the bad things” he had been through.
“And as I walk to school, they fall in front of my eyes. And when I lie down and go to sleep, they fall into my dreams,” the boy told him. “But when I come and see you, we take them out of the bin, and we unscrunch them. Then we read them through carefully, then we fold them up neatly, and then we put them back in the bin. But because they’re folded up neatly, it means they don’t fall out the top, and I’ve got more room in my head to think about other things.”
For Sameer, his ability to cope came down to his mindset. “With the passage of time, I became used to the situation and I feel confident and fine now. And I hope, whatever problems or difficulties I face in the future, I will overcome and hopefully things will get normal.”
