Millions of refugees around the world suffer in silence, not because they lack a voice, but because their pain is misunderstood or mismeasured.

On World Refugee Day, we uplift the voices and lived realities of displaced communities and call for deeper, more culturally responsive care.

At TIES, we work hard to partner with local communities and integrate methods that capture participant voices directly. For example, the paper we reshare today highlights some of the qualitative work we have done as part of the iRRRd study, led by Rohingya researchers and collaborators, to explore cultural concepts of distress (CCDs) among Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar. It identifies five locally meaningful expressions of emotional suffering, like tenshon and bishi sinta, that often go unrecognized by standard mental health tools.

As we act in solidarity with refugees, we must design support systems that reflect how communities themselves understand and communicate distress.

Excerpt: Rohingya refugees residing in Bangladesh have been exposed to profound trauma in addition to ongoing daily stressors of living in the refugee camps. Accurate assessments of mental health burden and their impact among this population require culturally sensitive tools that remain lacking in this context. The purpose of this study was to characterize salient cultural concepts of distress (CCDs), their causes, consequences, and approaches to treatment, among Rohingya refugees living in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, to help inform future measurement and intervention design.

Authors:Kathy Trang, Caroline Hiott, AK Rahim, Shafiqur Rahman, Alice J Wuermli

KEYWORDS: Mental Health, Rohingya