Refugees, grief and loss: Critical debates

This paper discusses the major issues facing refugees and asylum seekers who flee across international borders. It will review briefly the flight, asylum and settlement processes refugees face before considering the potential effects of these on mental health and wellbeing. The ways that any resulting distress is frequently categorised in Western countries using the dominant biomedical lens of PTSD is considered and some of the major debates reviewed, including the lack of research specifically on loss and grief among refugees. The authors suggest that the grief and loss that many refugees experience might helpfully be understood with due consideration of the culture and explanatory frameworks used by both clinicians and refugees. Some refugees experience ambiguous loss, when individuals are missing or displaced in their country of origin and, consequently, the normal grieving process may be compromised. The need to account for the meaning‑making experience of each individual refugee within their cultural, sociopolitical and familial context is emphasised, as is the importance of recognising and working with the immense resilience that many refugees display as they start to build new lives.