- Suffering from mental health issues in the future
it will affect your level of education,
of how much you will be involved in the new society,
your ability to go back and rebuild your country.
No one wants to stay in the US or in Europe.
Look at the refugees for now,
the Palestinians for after seventy years,
they still want to go back.
No one wanna stay away from home.
- How would you compare
the way children are seen
when they come rolling ashore in the Greek islands
from across the Mediterranean?
- It's difficult because you have to be there
to really feel it.
They don't cry,
most of the people think that they cry.
If they are crying,
there is children for sure that are crying,
but there're the good
and there's the minority, and majority don't cry,
they cry all the way and then they stop.
And because crying is an alarm
for the environment, for the adults, for the parents,
that there's something wrong
and when the alarms are not working, you know,
the alarms just stops
and they use more
strong defense mechanism
of just split
and be just the body,
and the soul and the mind just go beside
and there is no connection.
And this is the core
of developing of post traumatic stress disorder
in the future
when you're just dealing with the body
and there is no mind anymore in the shore.
- What would a clinical setting be like
if you're going to treat a child?
- You need to be there for him.
I think being,
is the most important thing
in working with children.
Being with him in the room
as a human being, as a therapist,
to give him the space where he can express himself,
because I believe that all children are born okay,
we the adults just make something bad for them
that make them not okay.
So the therapist, first thing,
needs to be that good model
of caring adult
that will be there for him in the room.
- When you're dealing with a young child
who already has this
complex collection of problems.
Where do you begin?
Can you create a hierarchy of problems?
What do you try to work on first?
- First of all the community.
I think in the refugee crisis,
especially come to Europe
and to the west, to the US and Australia,
we're dealing with refugees
coming from the Middle East Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan.
We're talking about a total different culture,
which is a culture that built on the collectivism,
it's not about the individual.
And the power of the community
is so strong that can really heal people.
So the first thing we need to do
is to create the community again
and then we need to start working with the people.
But that the western approach of psychology
that it's based on the individual well being
doesn't work for refugees.
We need to address them as a group,
we need not just to be sensitive
to their culture and mentality,
we need to be competent for this.
We need to work through their mentality, not against it.
I agree that we need to empower a woman
but is it the right place to do it on the shore
or in the transit camp,
or with the alpha male
that was ruling all his life now lost everything
and now you're empowering his woman
and leaving him aside
because he's so violent and aggressive.
He's not violent and aggressive.
This is how depression in the east,
we, I'm coming from there, we take it out
we don't do internalization process when we're depressed,
we don't sit and say "Oh God What happened to me?"
No, we become aggressive,
we become a little bit of agitated.
This is this is how depression in the east is.
So we neglect the man
and we focus in the woman, for example,
and this is how domestic violence
just start to raise inside the camps.
What I'm saying all the time,
what drives me crazy,
these people who just cross seas and mountains
and fight ISIS and Bashar and regimes
and smugglers and Turks and whatever, name it,
when they arrive to Greece,
well, the first thing we say to them,
oh, you're weak, you are refugees,
oh, please go, come here,
I am the white man,
with the keys for everything,
I will take care of you.
We don't celebrate the strength of the refugees.
So, actually we are part of the problem.
It's not because we're bad people
it's just because we don't understand the difference.
And in the camps
that are inside Syria
or in even Turkey or in Jordan,
it's still not different because it's the same community.
There is no threat for my culture,
there is no threat for my religion,
I don't feel that I am starting a new fight now.
So it's more easy for them to start the life again.
- Ideally what would that look like?
How would that work?
If you could arrive at one of these places
and say, here I am.
I wanna set up a system
that's going to work, that's culturally relevant,
that meets the needs of people
who are not going to drop in voluntarily.
What would it look like?
- I did it.
- Well tell us what you did.
- It's called the "Inverted Pyramid."
The inverted pyramid is when you arrive to a camp
where there's no referral system for mental health
and you start with the community,
you start with everyone.
Firstly with the community,
let's have elections so you can have to represent yourself.
Let's see what's your right,
if you are a teacher you can teach,
if you are hair artist
please open a store.
Let's create the community
because the community can heal itself
especially for people who're coming from the east,
from a culture
that is about and based on the collective well being.
And when you create the community
and the community start functioning
by bringing food, for example.
It's much easier
and it's photographed well.
If I bring pizza for everyone
maybe the fans will like it
and give, oh, he feeds 1000 people, but no.
If I bring thyme and olive oil and za'atar
and I bring it to the camp
and make the people make the food,
they can come together, they will celebrate.
The smell has a power.
So all these community activities,
creating the community again,
the together,
it can heal a lot of the problems.
And we saw that with three to four professionals
and group of trained volunteers,
you can give a full service of mental health support
to 500 people in one camp
For example in Diavata Thessaloniki in 2016.
So it's not about that there is not enough,
it's about that there is no referral system,
and this referral system
when we create it need to be culturally adapted
to the people.
- Right now, today,
there're millions of people
in camps
in the region.
The population of Lebanon
has grown by like 40%
just from refugees.
When those people go home,
what kind of help are they going to need then?
Is it going to change,
are they gonna need
different sort of mental health services to be resettled?
- To make people go back, you need them to be strong.
I think one of the the major obstacles of refugees
is dealing with
the state of mind of being a refugee.
Now camp has open
but we teach them,
the system teach them
to wait for the fish,
not go and fish,
we don't celebrate their strength.
So let's celebrate their strength.
France won the World Cup
with almost 80%
of refugees and immigrants in their national team.
I think diversity can make us just more beautiful
and more human.
And this is what we need to achieve,
to celebrate the strength of these people
and to celebrate the diversity, not the opposite.