Can we protect refugee children from mental health problems?— a scoping review of modifiable factors to inform preventive interventions
Published in Social Sciences, General & Internal Medicine, and Public Health
As a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I have spent much of my clinical work supporting children and families facing adversity. Over the years, I became increasingly interested in the mental health of migrant and refugee children, a population often exposed to multiple challenges before, during, and after migration.
When reading the literature, I noticed that many studies described the risks faced by refugee children: trauma, displacement, family separation, uncertainty, poverty, discrimination, and barriers to services. While this evidence is essential, I kept returning to a simple question:
What can actually be changed?
For clinicians, public health professionals, educators, and policymakers, identifying risks is only the first step. To design preventive interventions, we need to understand which factors are potentially modifiable and where action is most likely to make a difference. This question became the starting point for our scoping review.
As we reviewed the literature, one finding stood out. The determinants of refugee children's mental health do not operate in isolation. Individual factors such as coping skills or language proficiency interact with family factors such as parental mental health and family routines. These, in turn, are influenced by community support, school environments, access to services, and broader policy decisions, including asylum procedures and integration policies. What emerged was a picture of mental health shaped by interconnected systems rather than by single exposures.
Another observation was equally important: many of the identified factors are, at least in principle, modifiable. This carries an important message. Mental health outcomes are not determined solely by past adversity. There are opportunities to strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability through interventions at multiple levels.
This perspective aligns closely with public health thinking. Instead of focusing exclusively on treatment after problems emerge, we can also ask how to create conditions that promote positive mental health and prevent difficulties from developing in the first place.
For me personally, this review represented an important part of my PhD journey in Public Health. It also reinforced something I have observed repeatedly in clinical practice: improving children's mental health often requires looking beyond the child alone and considering the wider family, community, and policy contexts in which they live.
I hope this work can contribute to future research, prevention strategies, and policies that support refugee children and their families more effectively.
You can read the full paper here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12916-026-04619-z
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