World Mental Health Day 2022: Bringing Trauma-Informed Yoga to RefuSHE

World Mental Health Day provides an opportunity to raise awareness of mental health issues around the world and to mobilize efforts to make mental health and well-being for all a global priority. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global crisis for mental health, fueling short- and long-term stresses and undermining the mental health of millions. Mental health services have been severely disrupted and the treatment gap for mental health conditions has widened. Growing social and economic inequalities, protracted conflicts, violence, and public health emergencies have affected whole populations, threatening progress toward improved well-being.

At RefuSHE, we’ve committed to strengthening the mental health care we offer our community of refugee girls through a range of accessible, trauma-informed services and supports. Earlier this year, we entered a partnership with the Yoga Alliance Foundation in order to bring trauma-informed yoga to our campus in Nairobi. At RefuSHE, we believe that mental health and psychosocial recovery should be the foundation upon which education and empowerment interventions are built. In order to do this, we have begun deepening and increasing access to mental health services beyond talk therapy and introducing additional tools for treatment like trauma-informed yoga.

There is a growing body of evidence that regular yoga practice produces numerous psychological benefits, such as reducing the severity of stress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. There is also documented success in using yoga and yoga-based treatments to support active-duty military and veterans recovering from PTSD. Our team at RefuSHE believes that unaccompanied and separated refugee young women could experience similar benefits and that somatic-based therapies such as trauma-informed yoga present a unique opportunity given the language barriers of the refugee population and the sexual trauma that many have experienced. We know that addressing trauma is the first step in ensuring that the girls on our campus feel safe, stable, and secure. It is only once these base needs are addressed that we can expect the girls in our programs to flourish in their educational, economic, and social spheres.

Through our partnership with the Yoga Alliance Foundation, we have been able to offer regular yoga classes to refugee girls enrolled in our Girls Empowerment Program (GEP) and our own RefuSHE staff. We’ve also developed additional partnerships to offer trauma-informed yoga to residents of our Safe House.

Ahead of World Mental Health Day, RefuSHE’s Chief Investment & Resource Officer, Jessi Wolz, sat down with our partners at Yoga Alliance for a special webinar on "Understanding and Combating Mental Health Stigma Around the World." The webinar was hosted by Richard Lui of NBC News/MSNBC and featured two leaders in the fight against mental health stigma: Mme. Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and RefuSHE's own, Jessi Wolz. Together, they examined what mental health stigma looks like worldwide and how yoga professionals can de-stigmatize mental health in their classes and daily lives.

We are grateful to work with like-minded organizations like Yoga Alliance Foundation in order to widen the reach of yoga and make it available to individuals who otherwise may not have access. Committing to holistic care means providing refugees (and the community that supports them!) with the highly specialized and tailored tools they need to heal.