In light of the 2021 United States military withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as the humanitarian crises of mass displacement and subsequent health system strain that have ensued, practitioners worldwide will need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the adverse life experiences that women from Afghanistan frequently endorse. As they bear a disproportionate impact of constraints within Afghan society, and as patriarchal systems affect most of their life domains, women from Afghanistan may present with high levels of baseline trauma upon resettlement, and health systems may seek to attenuate this distress; However, the nature of these traumatogenic events may shape women's receptivity to psychosocial interventions, particularly those which are at least partially rooted in Western modalities. In the absence of sufficient literature on evidence-based interventions for this population, a diversity of ethnographic and clinical literature is synthesized, including literature on interventions alleged to be compatible with Afghan norms. As it will be essential to support Afghan women's mental health following social reorganization on a massive scale, considerations arising from the interdisciplinary literature are offered so that they may inform the development of structured, trauma-focused interventions and so that the health systems with which they interface may be better prepared to serve them.

Critiques of resettlement bodies exist in both formal and informal discourse, though these concerns had heretofore been allowed to remain liminal. The push towards accountability engendered through the rapid democratization of media, accelerated by several high visibility humanitarian crises, has now revitalized the trajectory of criticisms through some degree of institutional reflection. While formal critiques of humanitarian bodies often focus on the philosophical and moral quandaries of the quest to decolonize and de-weaponize social sciences (as well as the systematic disempowerment of resettled communities), fewer address the syndemic ethical challenges encoded into the daily operations of the humanitarian ecosystems themselves, as well as the feedback loops which they foment. This article is concerned with matters of praxis, professionalization and transparency, addressing blocks to the information flows necessary to enable the level of introspection and systems thinking which should underpin all human sciences, but which have been conspicuously absent in the U.S. resettlement bodies, despite their being so directly intertwined with life outcomes. Absent the development of dedicated, integrated health and other supportive infrastructures independent of resettlement organizations, and primarily utilizing the U.S. resettlement bodies to inform its arguments, it highlights the need for the resettlement field, and by extension, similar humanitarian sectors, to align themselves with various disciplinary standards that will promote and valorize accountability over expansion. It concludes that to accomplish this, fields must also seek to catalyze the exploration of the many tensions inherent to equitable restructuring through the empowerment of practitioners as well as the elimination of barriers to constructive discourse.

In light of the 2021 United States military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the humanitarian crises of mass displacement and health system strain that have ensued, this article focuses on Afghan family systems as a means of enhancing practitioner awareness of the potential impact of adverse life experiences on resettled Afghans’ receptivity to psychosocial interventions at least partially rooted in Western methodologies. As they bear a disproportionate impact of constraints within Afghan society, and as patriarchal systems affect most of their life domains, in addition to migration and conflict-induced stress, women from Afghanistan may have high baseline trauma levels upon resettlement. In the absence of robust literature on evidence-based psychosocial interventions for this population, ethnographic work and literature on existing clinical models alleged to be compatible with Afghan norms is reviewed and synthesized. The article finds the need for improved provider education in working with foreign-born populations, and thus proposes participatory research design considerations for future clinical studies, elaborating on important considerations for the evaluation of extant understandings following social reorganization on a massive scale.