Strand 4: Grassroots, real-world application, and innovation

Helping Refugees Heal, One Moment at a Time: Clinical Science with a Restorative Social Justice Mission with Amit Bernstein

The global human rights crisis of forced displacement has led to a global mental health crisis among tens of millions of refugees and asylum-seekers in communities around the world. The majority of forcibly displaced people and communities are marginalized and minoritized prior to displacement, and often exposed to institutional and communal inequities, discrimination and systemic injustice post-displacement. Likewise, even fast-emerging climate crises, which are creating a new generation of “climate refugees”, have predominantly impacted minoritized and marginalized communities around the world. Yet, despite the magnitude, urgency, and projected growth of this global crisis of social exclusion and injustice, our collective scientific knowledge and capacity to prevent and heal the devastation of forced displacement is years behind the challenge.

Amit says: "I will share my group’s mission over the past decade and our vision for the coming decade, to help build a psychological and contemplative science dedicated to the mental health and restorative social justice of forcibly displaced people. I will describe how we have aimed to include and to empower diverse communities of refugees and asylum-seekers to heal and thrive; through a community-embedded, inter-cultural, community-participatory model to psychological science and social impact, developed with and for forcibly displaced communities. I will focus on findings and theory that led to development and study of a mindfulness- and compassion-based intervention program, that is trauma-sensitive and socio-culturally-adapted, for refugees and asylum-seekers; as well as our efforts to develop, a human-supported digital mobile-health adaptation of the program designed to scale-up its global reach and impact. I will highlight randomized clinical trial findings that point to the transformative potential of mindfulness and compassion training to help refugees cultivate moments of inner refuge and safety, and thereby, initiate a process of recovery and healing; and the struggles to use digital delivery formats to optimize reach and access. I will also share emerging contemplative approaches that we are working on targeting inter-relational and inter-dependent (objective and felt) belonging and compassion post-displacement. Finally, I will also share our vision for the Moments of Refuge Project – a social impact and research initiative dedicated to mental health and restorative social justice among survivors of conflict, collective trauma and forced displacement around the world."