Despite the high health and mental health care needs, resettled refugees often face cultural and linguistic challenges that hinder the access to appropriate and timely interventions and services. Additionally, such concepts as preventive health or mental health treatment are foreign to this population, which creates additional burdens to the refugee community that already have difficulty navigating a complex health care system in the U.S. To address multiple and complex gaps in health and mental health support for the refugee community, requested is an innovative approach that can convey culturally responsive and effective interventions for health promotion, such as peer-based health education. Few studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of peer-led community health interventions with refugee populations in the U.S. resettlement context. However, peer-led interventions have been shown to be effective when working with cultural minorities and interventions in an international context. Adopting a social capital framework, the current study conducted qualitative evaluation on the impact of a pilot peer-led community health workshop (CHW) in the Bhutanese refugee community. A hybrid thematic analysis of focus group discussion data revealed the improvement in health promotion outcomes and health practice, as well as perceived emotional health. The results also showed that the peer-led CHW provided a platform of community building and participation, while increasing a sense of community, sense of belonging and unity. The findings posit that a peer-led intervention model provides culturally responsive and effective tools for building social capital and promoting community health in the refugee community.

Westernized approaches to mental health care often place limited emphasis on refugees' own experiences and cultural explanations of symptoms and distress. In order to effectively assess community mental health needs and develop interventions grounded in local needs, mental health programs need to be informed by an understanding of cultural features of mental health, including cultural idioms of distress (CIDs). The current study aims to explore CIDs among Somali refugees displaced in Kenya to understand mental health needs in cultural context and serve the community in a culturally responsive and sensitive manner. This research was conducted as a two-phase qualitative study. First, key informant interviews with Somali mental health stakeholders generated a list of 7 common Somali CIDs: buufis, buqsanaan, welwel, murug, qaracan, jinn, and waali. Typologies of each CID were further explored through four focus group interviews with Somali community members. The findings from a template analysis revealed Somali lay beliefs on how trauma and daily stressors are experienced and discussed in the form of CIDs and how each term is utilized and understood in attributing symptoms to associated causes. This study highlights the need to incorporate colloquial terms in mental health assessment and to adopt a culturally relevant framework to encourage wider utilization of services and religious/spiritual support systems.

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This study explores the reactions of social work students in a course on trauma treatment and how those reactions changed over time. Consensual qualitative research methods were used to analyze 17 participant journals submitted at 4 times during the course. Findings indicate that students expe rienced a range of responses to traumatic material, including both positive and negative emotional, cognitive, behavioral, physical, and relational reactions. Student survivors of trauma reported reac tions related to their own trauma. Although student reactions became less acute over time during the course, recommendations for the pedagogy of trauma are offered, including curriculum related to the management of vicarious and secondary trauma reactions as well as the development of evidence-based practices for self-care.

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