Coca-Cola and hookah: Yazidi refugees’ negotiation of hopeful futures and psychosocial resilience in U.S. resettlement

Abstract

Large numbers of refugees from Iraq continue to resettle in the United States, but there is limited information about the mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of ethnoreligious Yazidi refugees in a U.S. resettlement context. Thus, we sought to answer the following questions: (1) How do different groups of Yazidi refugees experience and perceive mental health and psychosocial wellbeing?; (2) What are Yazidi refugees’ preferred help-seeking strategies and supportive resources to promote psychosocial resilience?; and (3) What role does future-making play in the psychosocial resilience of Yazidi refugees? To answer these questions, we conducted four age- and gender-disaggregated focus groups with 28 Yazidi refugees living in the U.S. Midwest. Using narrative and matrix analysis approaches, we generated three themes highlighting the importance of hope and future-making in individual and collective psychosocial resilience: (1) psychosocial distress and the precarity of future-making out-of-place, (2) perceptions of mental health and psychosocial help-seeking using unfamiliar systems of care, and (3) liminality, cultural negotiation, and future-making. Our findings reveal an interplay between the cultural and structural dimensions of wellbeing and suggest an ecosocial-structural approach is essential for effective mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) with Yazidi refugees.