The wide-ranging life changes a newcomer faces permeate every aspect of daily life and experience. The emotional and psychological challenges of these changes, occurring at multiple levels and all at once, effecting all aspects of normalcy, places substantial strains on the energy and resilience required of a person to adequately adjust to them. For those also impacted by trauma this challenge is particularly overwhelming, and often insurmountable, if the trauma is not healed.

Humanitarian assistance to refugees typically tends to focus primarily on the most concrete and visible needs, such as medical, food, shelter, clothing,  and other socio-economic needs. Although medical and socio-economic needs can be significant contributing stressors to a newcomers capacity to successfully resettle and productively move forward with their lives, limiting the support focus exclusively or primarily to these categories of needs more often leads to the neglect of less immediately visible and more long term debilitating psycho-emotional wounds.

Over time these wounds can become embedded in a person’s consciousness, body, self-identity, and world view, and increasingly emerge as major blocks to daily functioning that seriously undermines progress in all other areas of adjustment, support, and overall quality of life. There is also the risk of the unresolved trauma experiences of family members having long term negative effects on the health and well-being of other family members and close relationships, and in the case where there is a large number of newcomers suffering from unresolved traumas, negative effects on the newcomer community broadly. In some cases profound unresolved trauma can negatively impact future generations as transgenerational trauma.

Organizations and community representatives in host communities assisting the resettlement of refugees consistently point to major and often debilitating mental health symptoms, including psycho-emotional trauma, as the main obstacle to an individual successfully making the transition from being uprooted out of their previous lives and sense of place, to adapting, integrating, and moving forward to a new life in an often very different society, culture, language, and geography.

The continuing lack of treatment for refugees struggling with trauma that is needed to achieve this level of healing, recovery, and stability is primarily due to language and cultural gaps that preclude accessing English-language-only-based mental health services.
Contributing  factors are lack of familiarity with mental health services, and heavy stigma regarding acknowledging and seeking help for mental health needs.

While there exists some local in-person and virtual efforts in some communities in the country to address this need to varying degrees, these are more limited in languages and cultures offered, types of services provided, access, and numbers served; and most often located in larger urban areas where there are more skill resources available than in small to medium sized cities. The largest, most critical, and growing gap in service to this population occurs in small to medium host communities.

No multi-lingual, culturally sensitive service delivery system for this at-risk population currently exists nation-wide to address this growing need for newcomer mental health services in most host communities, and particularly in medium to small cities and towns spread across the country.

The result is that severe mental health needs go unattended and are allowed to become chronically dysfunctional in a person’s life, to the detriment of both the individual and the community they are becoming part of.