Abstract
The increasing need for psychological services to address the mental health needs of war-traumatised refugees is paramount to attending to their physical and social needs. Due, Green, and Ziersch (2020) found that people from refugee and asylum-seeker backgrounds are more likely to have experienced mental illness than the general population yet encounter a broad range of barriers to access to healthcare services to treat mental illness. However, to date, there has been no comprehensive consideration of further potential psychological distress that can occur as a result of the lack of psychological assistance available for intervention. The alarming global increase of displaced war traumatised refugees creates an urgency to adapt necessary interventions to address psychological needs of refugees.
Due to its foundations; techniques; adaptability to time, and the global increasing number of war traumatised refugees who require urgent psychological assistance to address mental health challenges which arise from trauma, mindfulness-based interventions, such as trauma-sensitive mindfulness, provide unique and appropriate responses to the inimitable challenges experienced by war-traumatised refugees as the approach is considered to move beyond problem solving and towards achieving wellbeing.
This intervention study explores mindfulness-based interventions as the fourth wave of positive psychological interventions (PPI) used to address symptoms related to a possible diagnosis of PTSD experienced by war-traumatised refugees. In doing so the study provides significant literature on the background, theoretical framework and practice of Buddhist psychology as the foundations of the practise of mindfulness-based interventions. Through the analysis of retrospective case studies, the study explores how trauma-sensitive mindfulness (TSM) was adapted by an educational psychologist to address symptoms related to a possible diagnosis of PTSD experienced by war-traumatised refugees, during a relief mission in Amman, Jordan.