Mental Health Support and its Cultural Understanding – A comparative study on the impacts of humanitarian aid in the context of IDP camps in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Sammanfattning: Mental health issues are a serious matter with great consequences on livelihoods. Iraqi Kurdistan is situated in one of the most unstable regions and experienced an influx of IDPs over time who are in need of mental health support. However, mental health support is shaped and understood differently according to the culture. The purpose of this research is therefore to investigate the consequences of the discrepancy between Western and local understanding and framing of mental health support (MHS) in IDP camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. To find answers to the research question, the methodology is based on the grounded theory by Charmaz. The data was mainly collected through semi-structured interviews with western psychologists working in the context of humanitarian aid in Iraqi Kurdistan and local mental health workers. The main findings revealed that a lack of understanding of what mental health support means and entails in the respective cultural contexts is based on differences. Differences in expectations, knowledge, the words used to describe the concepts, outlooks towards the future, how to approach the support, the way of sense-making, the suitability of solutions to certain problems, the expression of feelings, how society supports each other, and the communication of it all. This research concludes that mental health projects in IDP camps lack sustainability, practicality, and cultural appropriateness for humanitarian aid to fulfill its purpose. There needs to be a shift in how this work is realized, by decolonizing aid, which means localizing and including, by for example expanding the local education opportunities.