Psychological Skills Group for Youth of Refugee and Immigrant Backgrounds

Boston Children's Hospital

Status

Completed

Conditions

Acculturation Problem

Stress, Psychological

Treatments

Behavioral: Trauma Systems Therapy for Refugees Group Intervention

Study type

Interventional

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT03763591

IRB-P00029550

Details and patient eligibility

About

There are currently 28 million child refugees worldwide - approximately 1 in every 200 children on earth. To date, nearly one million forcibly displaced child migrants have been resettled in the United States. It is well documented that refugee and immigrant youth, especially forcibly displaced ethnic and cultural minority youth, present with alarmingly high rates of stress-related psychiatric illness (e.g., PTSD, depression, anxiety) and are grossly underserved by current mental health, medical, and social services. Previous research found that in a sample of 144 Somali refugee children resettled in the United States, only 8% of those who met full clinical criteria for PTSD received any mental health services. Through a process of community-based participatory research with refugee and immigrant communities and stake-holders the investigators have developed a multi-tiered psychological and systems intervention for refugee youth and families, Trauma Systems Therapy for Refugees (TST-R), that includes community outreach and advocacy, group psychological treatment, office-based psychotherapy, and home-based services.

Whereas TST-R is one of the only empirically-based behavioral health treatment models for refugee youth, it has only been studied as a full intervention model; financial and staffing resource barriers have limited the wide-spread adoption of the model. This obstacle noted, implementing one high-impact component of this multi-tier intervention (i.e., protocol-driven group treatments) may provide significant benefit while also being easily scalable. Implementing time-limited (i.e., 10 week) manual-based group psychological interventions focused on culturally-responsive strategies to support refugee youth with, and at-risk for, PTSD, depression, and anxiety, may be an efficient and cost effective means of (1) reducing psychiatric symptoms for refugee and migrant youth with present symptoms, (2) preventing symptom onset for those at risk, and (3) enhancing cultural identity self-concept, subjective social belongingness, and psychological resilience (e.g., ability to thrive in the context of adversity). Furthermore, if effective, treatment groups can importantly function as a destigmatizing treatment gateway and triage to other services for youth who require a higher level of care (e.g., individual psychotherapy and medication management).

Enrollment

13 patients

Sex

All

Ages

15 to 18 years old

Volunteers

No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Age 15-18 years old living in the Greater Boston Area.
Of refugee or immigrant background (e.g., youth or a parent arrived to the USA as a refugee or immigrant)
No current plans to move from Greater Boston Area within the next 6 months
Conversationally proficient in English language

Exclusion criteria

Not able to attend group once a week for 10 weeks
Medical, cognitive, or other health or psychosocial issue that would prevent consistent and engagement and participation in group.