Evaluation of an Online Mindfullness Course for Preceived Stress among Refugees Compared to Face-to-Face Course

Refugees are people who crossed borders, fleeing due to problems related to race religion and nationality. While fleeing, refugees unknowingly carry many diseases due to lack of mental help and attention. When coming to a new country, refugees have no self-esteem to get jobs due to the language barrier. Refugees who flee their country and sacrifice everything are confident and strong willed with all the obstacles that come through their journey to start a new life. The long-term effects that a refugee experiences due to forced migration is Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. Forced migration has a negative mental and physical affect on refugees.

In the Illness of Exile, it is reported that 90% of refugees suffer from depression, with post-traumatic stress disorder being overserve in approximately 50% (Moorehead,217). These mental illnesses highlighting the importance of addressing these issues before they become more severe. It is the job of clinicians to help address these issues and develop treatment plans that will best benefit the victims. Helping them to come to terms with their new notions of humanity. Clinicians must work diligently to prevent victims from succumbing to helplessness, by helping them accept its personal and social meaning.

In 2012, Canada received approximately 23,000 refugees and their families (Statistics Canada, 2012). Canada welcomes an ethno cultural diversity and follows the international mandate to ensure safety, stability and accessibility to health services for refugees. The refugees come from different countries, which are socioeconomically unstable, and they are in search of stability and a better destiny. Canada is recognized as one of the most developed countries in the world, it is undeniable that the protection of refugees will be provided. The Ottawa Newcomer Clinic, located in Ottawa, is one of the agencies that welcomes newcomer refugees. This clinic plays an essential role in the reintegration of refugees in their new environment and provides preventive healthcare services. To improve its services, the team members of the clinic are committed to promoting mental health in order to undertake a holistic approach in the care of refugee youths. Consequently, it is important to explore the obstacles facing this particular population using the Population Health model in order to identify startegies for mental health promotion programs that aims to optimize the health status of refugee youths. This brings us to review the importance of mental health among refugees and concepts involved, such as importance of the role of health care providers who have direct contact with the target population as well as mental health promotion.

Since Indochinese refugees started arriving in the United Sates, the main concern have been voiced about consequences of the war and their experiences on their mental health. There haven’t been any studies that examined the complex relationships between psychological traumatic experiences and depression among Vietnamese Americans. Studies on the mental health status of people after traumatic experiences in war, Nazi concentration camps, and natural disasters found that traumatic social and natural events are related to various forms of psychological problems among the victims (Tran, 1993). Most refugees fled from Vietnam to the United States to get away from the horrifying tragic. According to (Kunz, 1973), refugees are “pushed out of” their country, whereas immigrants are “pulled away from” their homeland. Vietnamese respondents in this study were conceived and grew up amid the war, and a significant number of them were specifically included in battle or invested years in death camps, either in comrade detainment facilities or in refugee camps. While others witnessed violent death of family members, or experienced rape, robbery, or starvation as they escaped from Vietnam.

The author states that we must build a family-centered approach to refugee mental health. To the majority of people it might seem obvious that when it comes to treatment, it should not be one size fits all. Yet that seems to be what mental health professionals are doing with the majority of refugees.

Published in “Newsweek”, “The Neuroscience of Meditation, And the Virtues of Shutting Up,” by Zoe Schlanger, is an article to persuade stressed out and skeptical people towards meditation. Published in 2015, the focus of this article is to help those who don’t understand how “powerful” meditation can be and how others may react to the situation. Miss Schlanger not only puts in her own personal experience, but also brings in other information to try to help guide them to a positive outlook on the way meditation helped her and how it could help them as well. This piece effectively helps the target audience lean toward the idea of meditation by switching from casual to formal diction, using personal experience, and organizing to keep the flow interesting.

Dickinson, Friary and McCann (2016) state that Kabat-Zinn’s (2011, 1991) Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program is connected to mindfulness. Bishop et al (2004) claim that suggesting Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) as a means of treating people’s sufferings has significantly increased the clinical uses of mindfulness.

Mindfulness meditation has been reported for generating long-term, positive psychological effects of individuals whom incorporate the practice as a routine in their daily lives. In recent years, psychotherapeutic programs have made advances in research proving reduction of symptoms in chronic, psychosomatic, and psychiatric disorders. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) are two of many non religious programs designed to enhance an individual’s veridical perception and have a moment-to-moment understanding of their own mental processing. The practices are nonjudgmental and are meant to reduce negative effects of their disorder while improving vitality and coping (Grossman et al., 2004). An

Mindfulness meditation is referred to as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT. MBCT is increasing in popularity among new techniques in therapy around the globe. Studies have proven that mindfulness meditation can help to reduce daily turmoil such as depression, anxiety, and stress. It has been stated that “mindfulness is believed to promote good health, and many studies have associated mindfulness with decreases in depression and anxiety. (Good Therapy, 2016). There are many factors that cause one to experience depression, anxiety, or stress. During MBCT individuals are taught new techniques to control their emotions, which plays a big role in depression, anxiety, and stress.

Does race impact the association between environmental mastery and well-being? To what extent does race impact refugees’ mental well-being and their experiences in their countries of resettlement? This research will focus on administered survey and interview data collected on political refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, and African countries living in New Mexico, examining their mental health outcomes, well-being, and life mastery. This research contributes to the field of sociology with further implications in the fields of law, political philosophy, and psychology.

Argumentative thesis: Although many people assume medications such as antidepressants are the only way to treat patients with depression, meditation is a better choice of treatment as it prevents relapse in patients that are recurringly depressed, is accepted by a large portion of patients that are typically unwilling to take medication to treat their depression, and rebuilds brain structures affected by the mental illness,

Although previous studies have suggested that refugees are prone to developing post-traumatic disorders, but the recent survey focused on the risk of schizophrenia and other psychoses.

Displacement can have severe adverse effects on the physical, social, emotional and spiritual well-being of a person (“Handbook for the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons, 2007). “Exposure to violence or disaster, loss of or separation from family members and friends, deterioration in living conditions, the inability to provide for one’s self and family, and lack of access to services, can all have immediate and long-term consequences for individuals, families and communities, including post-traumatic stress disorders, psychosomatic illness, depression, anxiety and even violence,” as stated in the Handbook for the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons (ibid.). Consequently, these factors may even contribute to behavioral

Although resettled refugees tend to underutilize mental health care services, only a few studies have investigated in detail why they do not seek these services. Johnson et al. (2014), for instance, studied mental health of resettled refugee women by using the Refugee Health Screener-15(RHS-15), which screens for symptoms associated with anxiety, depression and PTSD among refugee population.16 Their study found that although half of the participants screened

Before taking the class, and before really understanding the benefits of mindfulness, I must admit, I did not really take mindfulness exercises seriously. I tried a few exercises, led by a phone application, but I constantly wondered what these exercises were supposed to achieve. I always thought to myself, “I know what happens around me, being mindful is great, but specific exercises for this seemed exaggerated.”