Rituals and healing ceremonies help to promote psychosocial wellbeing by increasing sense of identity and community in Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh
Religious buffer effect
This article identifies religious practices and gatherings, such as prayer, music and art, as coping strategies for Rohingya refugees residing in Bangladesh. They can produce a buffer effect to the exposure of violence.
Religious identity
In Myanmar, the Rohingya faced restrictions that prohibited them from maintaining their cultural and religious identity. Feeding into wider issues related to statelessness, this loss of identity was identified by Rohingya refugees as detrimental to their well-being. To be able to resume religious life was therefore identified as an important part of IOM’s MHPSS response.
International Organisation for Migration (IOM)
Respondents to the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) study expressed a desire to resume community and religious gatherings to counteract the negative impacts on their mental health of being stateless, loss of land, denial of basic identity rights, persecution and discrimination. In response, IOM devised Healing Ceremonies Programming which was delivered by their MHPSS team in Cox’s Bazaar. IOM found that this programme resulted in participants feeling an increased sense of calm, joy and well-being and increased awareness of their own resources and capacities for coping.
Comment:
This is an important case study, one of the few to detail a UN agency engaging explicitly with faith for MHPSS programming. Documents relating to the IOM Healing Ceremonies programming explored in this article do not appear to be publicly available. Perhaps as a result of this, this work and its findings to not appear to be widely known in the field, despite their relevance to the evidence base.
