"Community Leaders' Assessment on the Mental Health Concerns of Palestinian Refugees in Jordan"
Ten official Palestine refugee camps are located in Jordan. They accommodate 329,150 registered refugees, or 16 percent of the 1.7 million refugees registered with UNRWA in Jordan. Four of the camps in Jordan were set up after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and six after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
My work was largely done in the Zarqa refugee camp, the oldest and smallest camp in Jordan. The camp was set up by the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1949 for 8,000 refugees in an area of 180,000 square meters near the town of Zarqa. Since then, UNRWA has taken responsibility over the camp and there are currently 18,528 registered refugees in the Zarqa refugee camp alone. Due to a multitude of factors related to their day to day lives and uncertainty regarding their future, Palestinian refugees in Jordan are under significant psycho-social strain and are not receiving proper mental health care.
According to the World Health Organization, mental health is defined as a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community. Significant factors that have contributed to a lack of mental health care within the camps range from extreme poverty, a high unemployment rate, exposure to discrimination from the larger Jordanian community, overcrowded and polluted living conditions, and limited access to higher education and recreational services. The refugees live in abominable conditions, as sewer systems often run through the streets, the population density is extremely high, and open plots of land and especially green plots are very scarce. Moreover, a lack of recognition of the seriousness of mental illness and general lack of financial allocation has effectively prevented basic programs and services that can address and treat mental illness.
During my trip to Jordan, I interned in Zarqa's community rehabilitation center, doing volunteer home visits to the camp inhabitants and assessing the effectiveness of their relatively new community based rehabilitation (CBR) program. Through direct contact with refugees and social workers during my home visits, I was able to devise an initial template of interview questions. These questions were then adopted in my qualitative, phenomenological research study in which individual interviews were conducted with UNRWA social workers, camp officials, school counselors, healthcare providers, and Palestinian refugee mothers. Through these individual interviews, I investigated the mental health concerns of young Palestinian refugees. Most interviews were conducted in the Zarqa and Jarash refugee camps. The topic of discussion emphasized better understanding of what the most common mental health concerns of refugee children are, their coping strategies, and gathering recommendations for improvement of mental health care services. Through these interviews among the different UNRWA sectors (education, health, camp administration, ad camp inhabitants), I was able to help create a crucial link and avenue of communication between UNRWA's distinctive areas of work about the topic of mental health. This was subsequently used to devise a set of applicable recommendations.
The experience verified that mental, physical and social health are fundamental components of life that are closely interlaced and profoundly interdependent. Moreover, the experience was perspective-altering and humbling, one that will continually shape the way in which I perceive the impact that health policy has on an individual.