U. of Vermont psychologists helping Bhutanese refugees with mental problems; send more refugees to Vermont!
There really isn’t much new and exciting in this story, but I’m posting it because I was interested in the small number of refugees going to Vermont, after all, Vermont’s senior Senator Patrick Leahy has, over the years, been a big pusher for more refugees and more stuff for them.
UVM psychology professor Karen Fondacaro will be busy with her Bhutanese torture victims. Here with co-founder of NESTT (New England Survivors of Torture and Trauma).
We have had many many reports of Bhutanese (really Nepali people) who were living in UN camps on the edge of Nepal until we took 80,000 of them to America in the last 6 years or so and who are now in the US in need of mental health programs. See our Bhutanese archive with many posts on the high suicide rate among this group of refugees, some want to go home. (BTW, Reader CW recently suggested a the creation of a ‘Repatriation Fund’ for any refugee, unhappy with America, to be allowed to go home.)
From Kentucky.com (I wondered if a Kentucky publication reported this story as a hint to start mental health counseling in KY for its burgeoning refugee population):
BURLINGTON, Vt. — The scars Ajuda Thapa carries today are emotional — the product of years living in fear, being forced from her home in Bhutan and enduring the murder of her husband during 19 stateless years before she arrived in Vermont as a refugee.
Like many others like her here, she’s helping ease the emotional trauma she suffered through a special program at the University of Vermont for the region’s refugees.
[….]
But the safety she has now didn’t do anything for the anxiety, depression and lingering emotional scars that threatened to turn her into a recluse hiding in her home. So her doctor referred her toConnecting Cultures, a program at the University of Vermont that has helped ease the emotional trauma of hundreds of others like her.
Thapa regularly attends meetings where she talks about what she experienced.
“It helps a lot to get relief from that kind of mental pain,” said Thapa, an ethnic Nepali who became stateless after leaving Bhutan in 1992.
Here are some numbers for Vermont:
Connecting Cultures organizers have found that about 65 percent of the estimated 7,000 refugees living in greater Burlington from more than two dozen countries had suffered some form of torture. [Dr. Fondacaro will be very busy!]
[….]
Thapa has struggled to deal with the emotional trauma that comes with the nearly two decades of fear and loss she experienced after being forced from her home. She is one of an estimated 1,300 Bhutanese refugees who have been resettled in Vermont, the largest single refugee nationality in the state.
Those are paltry numbers compared to many other states…
There surely needs to be a national campaign to persuade Vermonters to be more “welcoming” and to accept more refugees there, after all that would only be fair! ...
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