Migration, Trauma, and Spirituality: Intercultural, Collective, and Contextual Understanding and Treatment of Trauma for Displaced Communities.

COMMUNITIES; TRANSNATIONALISM; SPIRITUALITY; POLITICAL violence; SOCIAL injustice; POVERTY

This article examines the traumatic impact of migration on displaced individuals and communities across the globe. Because migrants flee their homelands due to war, poverty, natural disaster, political violence, social injustice, and colonial oppression, migration trauma is inherently a collective, cumulative, and intercultural experience. The article argues that the prevailing model of trauma that is largely based on Western psychology and psychiatry is insufficient to address and examine the intercultural and contextual dimensions of migration trauma. In addition, the current biomedical model of trauma often overlooks the significance of religion and spirituality in people's experience of transnational migration. Thus, an intercultural understanding and treatment of migrants' traumatic experience requires a sociocultural analysis to understand how migrants, individually and collectively, engage resources, such as religious rituals and indigenous spiritualties, to cope with their losses and make new meaning toward recovery and healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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