BiteSize - The Impact of Psychological Support in Refugee Camps: Insights from a Clinical Psychologist.

Ever wondered how psychologists support refugees in dire conditions and the impact of these efforts on mental health? If you're curious about the resilience of those in crisis and the role of psychological aid, this episode is for you.

Welcome to this bitesize episode, where we delve into the remarkable journey of Dr. Katrin Glatz Brubakk, a clinical child psychologist and assistant professor at NTNU. Dr. Katrin Glatz Brubakk shares her profound experiences providing psychological support to refugees in various countries, including her visits to the Moria refugee camp in Greece. She sheds light on the harsh realities faced by refugees and the emotional toll these experiences have had on her, leading her to dedicate herself to humanitarian efforts.:

Imagine gaining insights from a clinical psychologist who has firsthand experience in refugee camps and understands the mental health challenges faced by displaced populations. 

By listening to this episode, you can:

• Understand Refugee Realities: Learn about the conditions in refugee camps and the psychological impact on those fleeing conflict.
• Importance of Mental Health Support: Discover the crucial role of psychological support in helping refugees cope with trauma.
• Societal and Political Dynamics: Explore how individual stories and societal responses influence public opinion and political action.

Three Benefits You'll Gain:

1. Firsthand Insights: Hear Dr. Glatz-Brubach's personal experiences and the challenges faced by refugees.
2. Psychological Support Strategies: Understand the methods and importance of providing mental health support in crisis situations.
3. Humanizing the Refugee Experience: Learn how to foster empathy and inspire meaningful change through personal connections and stories.

Are you ready to explore the realities of refugee life and the importance of psychological support in crisis situations? Scroll up and click play to join our enlightening conversation with Dr. Katrin Glatz Brubakk. Gain the knowledge and empathy needed to understand the refugee experience and the role of mental health support in fostering resilience and well-being.

Exploring Key Concepts and Issues:

Experiences in Refugee Camps:

• Dr. Katrin Glatz Brubakk shares her experiences in the Moria refugee camp, describing the dire conditions and emotional impact on both refugees and aid workers.
• She recounts the harrowing journeys of refugees arriving on the shores and the challenges they face, emphasizing the lack of adequate support.

Mental Health Support:

• The importance of creating safe spaces for children in crisis, allowing them to play and escape their worries.
• Addressing the mental health needs of refugees and the significant role psychological support plays in traumatic situations.

European Response to the Refugee Crisis:

• Reflecting on Europe's initial responses to the crisis, highlighting the mix of public empathy and political reluctance.
• The impact of individual stories, such as Alan Kurdi's tragedy, on shaping public opinion and political action.

Full Episode from S4 E12:

Chapters

• 0:08 Introduction to Bite Size Fridays
• 0:33 Delving into Dr. Katrine's Refugee Support Journey
• 1:25 Dr. Katrine's Emotional Response and Decision
• 4:20 Transition to Mental Health Support Focus
• 8:28 Initial Responses and Volunteer Efforts
• 14:21 Reflection on Personal Impact and Policy Concerns

Transcript

[0:00] Music.

[0:08] Well, welcome to It's an Inside Job Bite Size Fridays, your weekly dose of resilience, optimism, and well-being to get you ready for the weekend. Now, each week, I'll bring you insightful tips and uplifting stories to help you navigate life's challenges and embrace a more positive mindset. And so with that said, let's slip into the stream.

[0:27] Music.

[0:34] Hey, folks, welcome back to It's an Inside Job Bite Size Fridays. I'm your host, Jason Glenn. And this week, we are going to jump back into the archives into Season 4, Episode 12, where we're going to delve into the remarkable journey of Dr. Katrine Glatz-Brubach. Now, she's a clinical child psychologist and assistant professor at NTNU. With a passion for working refugee context, Katrine has spent the past eight years in the field providing support and assistance to refugees in Egypt, Congo, Turkey, and on a rescue boat in the Mediterranean. Now, notably, she has visited the Moria refugee camp in Greece 12 times, witnessing firsthand the dire conditions and complex challenges faced by refugees. So I hope this week's episode inspires you and leaves you inspired.

[1:26] When you get so close to acute suffering, the only thing you want to do is to help with whatever. ever. Um, so I came home, uh, quite late at night. Um, my husband had gone to bed and I sort of curled up next to him and he said, how was the trip? And I just started to cry and cry and cry. And I said, it can't be like this. This is Europe. We can't treat people this way. We have to, to do something about it. Um, so the next day I went to my boss, um, and I said, I'm sorry, sorry, um, I can't be here. I just have to go back. And two weeks later I went back and that started sort of a rhythm in my life where I've gone back 12 times, uh, to support sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for four months. Um, but, um, my, I think, I think the, um.

[2:24] Uh the reason that it hit me so hard was that uh this is a catastrophe it's a forgotten crisis um but it is something that we could do something about if if we wanted if there was political will um it's not a tsunami it's not an earthquake that we can't prevent but it is it's active choice every single day to let people live in horrible conditions um and i think it's It's not worthy of what Europe stands for. And that's why this has become my fight.

[3:00] And you've been back 12 times. I mean, what struck you the most? Being a child psychologist, was it seeing the children? Is that what really sort of struck home to you? Or was it just the masses themselves? Did you say they had to walk 60 kilometers in 45 degrees Celsius heat and they've just come off these boats yeah yeah so they were exhausted in the first place they were soaking wet i mean it was warm so they would dry up but you have salty clothes because all of them get wet from the salt water um some of them only had flip-flops um and walking six zero kilometers in flip-flops i can tell you it gives the worst kind of blisters and and damages on your feet, you can't imagine. I think in the beginning it was a shock. I never thought that Europe would leave people that way, so helpless. And I thought, and I think a lot of the other volunteers who were there as well, we thought, well, it's just a phase. Europe is overwhelmed by this. There's so many people coming at once. You can't expect there to be an apparatus to sort of deal with this. But just give it some time and then they'll find a solution.

[4:21] And then time went by and there was no solution. On the contrary, living in... So we moved from, or I moved from working on the beaches, just welcoming people, trying to...

[4:39] And sometimes when the boats were, when weather was rough and the boats had had a hard time over, it was really about giving psychological first aid, calming people down, giving them information, helping them getting off with clothes. If they came at night, it could be really cold. So getting off wet clothes giving them some new calming down parents so that they could palm down their children trying to create that little bubble of a safe environment for a little while until they had to move on and then as the situation on the beaches changes changed both that the UN eventually put up buses so that people didn't have to walk but but they were transported supported, my work changed as well. So in the beginning it was super acute and then it became more and more directed towards mental health and the children. So I created safe spaces for children where they could play and have activities.

[5:45] And play is super, super important in a in a context like this because um first of all um they these children have been most of them have been uh refugees for a long time which means they they've been worrying a long time about the situation because they can sense as well that it's not safe that they have to move on they worry about um their parents that they see worry um they have experienced a lot of trauma, both in their country of origin, but also on the way from smugglers, from police, people who are either abusing their mothers or they were abused themselves.

[6:24] So creating a space where they can actually go back to being children, just even if it's just for a little while, where they can play, where we can have fun.

[6:34] It is, it helps them calm down. It helps the body, they breathe better, they relax more, their nervous system is down regulated and they can just forget for a little while about all the worries they have. We can't take these worries away from them, but we can help them give these pockets or small breaks from the bad condition they're in. So that was one of the things that I've done a lot is to play with children as a therapeutic intervention. I have just so many questions. They're machine gunning in my head. So I just have to slow down my thinking here. So when you first experienced that in August 2015 in Lesbos and you saw the tragedy and the trauma before your eyes, it triggered something into you. It really awoke in values that you've been living, but it really brought them to the forefront. And you've made, obviously, some life decisions here that shifted your career, shifted your efforts and your actions and your investment of who you are. I just want to just rewind a little back. So, you know, as you said, you were shocked by sort of over time, sort of how Europe in general responded to this.

[8:00] From a psychologist's point of view, what is the reason, do you think, this mass that we call Europe, or it could be anyone, this mass of humanity that has privilege, that we feel safe and secure where we are, what do you think is, why was that reaction from many of us that way towards this unfolding tragedy?

[8:28] I think our first response, the very initial response from very many people in Europe was that, these are refugees from Syria, of course they're suffering, we need to help. And that was, at least that was the response in the public in general. That's why thousands and thousands of volunteers actually went to the Greek islands and supported, where there was no official support and the NGOs were still not the big NGOs were still not there a lot of people went down and did what I did um so that was the initial response um politically I think it was more of a fear reaction where where they seem to have been thinking that, these are too many we can't let them in we have to deal with it somehow know uh and and the way of dealing with it initially was uh just don't help them at all and then hopefully so not so many people will come it's a it's a very uh insensible way of responding because the reason people are fleeing from from their country is not because they're not welcomed where they are but because they have something to flee from um so so if your bombs fall on your head you take your family and you leave right um regardless of whether there's um.

[9:54] Somebody on the beach that can support you when you arrive because you just flee for your life.

[10:00] But then the incident of or the situation or the pictures of Alan Kurdi came. The small three-year-old boy who drowned just after having left Turkey with his family. That's the poor, unfortunate boy that washed up on the beach. He washed up on the beach. He has a red T-shirt, blue shorts. And he from afar it looks as if he's sleeping on the beach he has his face down in the sand and he really reminds you of a small child who's sleeping that picture had a huge effect it had a huge effect unlike the public as such but also politically because before that Germany had taken an initiative to try to redistribute some of the refugees who had arrived on the the Greek islands and said, well, Greece can't deal with this alone. We have to sort of have a solidarity act. That was really, really hard to agree upon. A lot of the countries, especially in the Eastern Bloc, did not want to take any of these refugees. But after Alain Curdie, he symbolized that children are innocent victims of the policy that we had at that time. It is actually affecting small children that could have been our children so then France got on board.

[11:27] And said we just have to we have to do this differently and then for a while the borders were open which meant that as soon as you arrived to the Greek islands you could just register and then you could move on to Europe and to whatever country you wanted to go to and then the famous words of Angela Merkel, the president of Germany.

[11:51] Said we'll deal with this via schaffen das which means it is a problem but we'll find a way we'll find a way to solve it her thought was that Europe would find a way to solve it unfortunately, not many people or not many countries wanted to cooperate to find that solution so so soon the borders were closed again and that's when Moria the camp really started to fill up and got very overcrowded. So it was sort of a flow of empathy, people wanted to help, and then the fear that there were too many, and then trying to find a solution politically, not finding any agreement that could sort of solve the problem in any way. And we've ended up basically with a policy that's about trying to make the conditions as bad as possibly, hoping that people won't flee because conditions are bad in the case that I know the best in Greece. But again, people are not fleeing. People won't stop fleeing because they know that they will live in a bad camp for a while or that their children won't go to school. People flee because they fear for their life or their children's future. So we're not solving the problem. We're We're just adding problems to the people who are actually fleeing.

[13:19] And that is what's my concern as a psychologist, is that the solutions that Europe has chosen now and the conditions that people are living in for a long time makes children more sick mental health-wise. And so we're inflicting pain and we're inflicting mental health damage on children due to the policy that we're choosing and it's not a hard problem to solve if if there was political will this problem could have been solved tomorrow morning, We just need to have the will. And that is what, I mean, in addition to seeing so many children suffering, that is the other thing that's really painful to me. That is, we have the knowledge. We know how we hurt children and adults by choosing the policy that we choose today.

[14:16] And we still accept it as politicians, but also as a society. You made so many salient points. You know, as you said, when you were in Lesbos in August 2015 and you saw it, it became very personal because it was there in front of your eyes. It was raw. It was unfiltered. It wasn't a news clip for 30 seconds and then move on to the next story.

[14:38] This was what it was. And when I try to comprehend, you know, sort of how the mass humanity tends to react, I come back to the individual when I'm working with individuals.

[14:52] And I can see when people feel vast amounts of uncertainty, when they feel the problem so overwhelming, the automatic response for the human psyche is to close down, push it away, avoid it. And and i think also when you said when that poor unfortunate boy you know he swept up uh onto the the beach and it looked like he was sleeping well what happened is it was no more longer a mass problem we saw an individual we it became personal to us and that's why you saw the reaction and that's why you know the human psyche kind of opened up the collective human psyche.

[15:28] You opened up the help but when it's the masses keep coming and keep coming and keep coming i think the normal reaction for many of us who have distance geographical whatever filters we have is just to shut it down because we don't know how to process that and i think what you're saying is that the politicians are not just the politicians but to have psychologists such as yourself maybe coming up with a policy to find something that takes care of both sides of the fence obviously the refugees to to handle it in a much more appropriate way and i i don't have any solutions so i'm just speaking sort of general terms but at the same time it's to understand because we what you don't want on the other side is like where it swings so far the pendulum swings so far that you get this political uproar and it brings out all these sort of the wackos out of the the woodwork saying, no, no, no, you know?

[16:24] And I can understand the fine balance that you speak of, but when it becomes personalized, when we see it, then as you said, all you want to do is help.

[16:36] And I think there's nothing more rewarding than to be in the service of others. But you are completely on the other side of the spectrum when you saw that on those beaches at Las Balsas. If you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? You will find the link in the episode in the show notes. So make sure you hit that subscribe button. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational episodes on Monday and the latest Bite Sites episode on Friday. And have yourself a relaxing and rejuvenating weekend.

[17:10] Music.