The COVID-19 pandemic is a defining global health crisis of our time. While the impact of COVID-19, including its mental health impact, is increasingly being documented, there remain important gaps regarding the specific consequences of the pandemic on particular population groups, including refugees and migrants. This study aims to uncover the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of refugees and migrants worldwide, disentangling the possible role of social and daily stressors, i.e., experiences of discrimination and daily living conditions. Descriptive analysis and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the responses of N = 20,742 refugees and migrants on the self-reporting global ApartTogether survey. Survey findings indicated that the mental health of refugees and migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic was significantly impacted, particularly for certain subgroups, (i.e., insecure housing situation and residence status, older respondents, and females) who reported experiencing higher levels of increased discrimination and increases in daily life stressors. There is a need to recognize the detrimental mental health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on particular refugee and migrant groups and to develop interventions that target their unique needs.

Latino immigrant families with children with disabilities experience multiple sources of oppression during their settlement process in the United States. Unfair social structures and dominant cultural values and norms and the way they influence the immigrants' personal life stories generate a cycle of oppression very difficult to break. This paper presents a case study of how a group of Latino parents carried out a process of liberation fueled by the generation of empowering community narratives (critical awareness leading to transformative action) that resulted from a community-university partnership. Participants initiated a process that led them to discover their own stories of oppression and create new stories; to deconstruct the dominant cultural narratives and modify existing ones; and to understand contexts for power sharing. This joint reflection and increased awareness propelled group members to take action by founding a grassroots organization to redress some of the injustices that were partly responsible for their oppression, thus generating shifts at the personal, relational, and collective levels. In light of the theory of liberation, we discuss the participants' development of critical awareness that led them to take action to address their unmet needs.

This paper describes an acculturative integration approach that stresses the contribution of liberation psychology. Immigrant integration is a challenge for receiving countries in the Western world due to the frequent asymmetrical and oppressive conditions suffered by newcomers in their new settlements. The cross-cultural perspective connects integration with psychological acculturation, emphasizing harmony between acquisitions of the new culture while maintaining cultural heritage, and creating opportunities for intergroup relationships. In turn, liberation psychology permits an understanding of the acculturative transition as an empowerment and self-construction process by which immigrants acquire a new vision of the world and of themselves, transforming both structural conditions and themselves. From this perspective we conceptualize acculturative integration as the process by which newcomers become an accepted part of the new society through a reflexive and evaluative process, changing their social references and position, rebuilding their social and personal resources, and achieving a new agency in coherence with their new challenges and goals. In this process, they acquire critical thinking about unequal conditions, gain capacities to respond to the inequalities, and take effective actions to confront them. We illustrate this process using the narratives of nine Moroccan women who are living in asymmetrical and oppressive local contexts in Andalusia, the southern-most region of Spain.

Various international organisations have identified the development of programmes that mitigate the negative impact that forced displacement has on refugees’ mental health as a priority intervention area. From this perspective, this study seeks to lend empirical support to a community‐based pilot intervention aimed at promoting posttraumatic growth (PTG) among refugee adults arrived to Seville, the capital of Andalucía (southern Spain). PTG constitutes a mental health indicator that refers to the positive personal transformations refugees undergo as a consequence of experiencing forced displacement. This concept does not negate the undeniable personal suffering forced displacement causes for refugees; rather, it focuses on the positive changes this event has the potential to bring about. Forty‐seven individuals (age, M = 33 years; 20 women) from several countries in conflict participated in the intervention over 15 weeks (March–June 2017). The implementation process comprised two phases: (a) training a group of settled refugees to become peer mentors; and (b) holding cultural peer‐support group sessions made up of newly arrived refugees led by the mentors. Following quantitative and qualitative data collection (using the ‘Posttraumatic Growth Inventory’ (PTGI; Tedeschi & Calhoun, Journal of Traumatic Stress, 1996, 9, 455) and participants’ written evaluations and comments, respectively), and adopting a pretest‐posttest evaluation design, significant improvements were found in four of the five PTG factors: ‘appreciation of life’, ‘personal strength’, ‘relating to others’ and ‘new possibilities’. However, no significant differences were observed for ‘spiritual change’. We also documented implementation outcomes which revealed high intervention acceptability, appropriateness and feasibility. This study highlights how PTG shown by the refugee population can be actively improved through a community‐based intervention, specifically by creating supportive community settings that adopt a mentorship and peer‐based approach. The limitations and contributions of this research that address the current challenges behind promoting the mental health of refugees in places of settlement are discussed.

This study aims to analyze the processes of resilience and empowerment experienced by refugees in southern Spain during their participation in a community‐based intervention. Intervention design covered two phases over 15 weeks: (a) accompanying a group of 10 settled refugees to become mentors, making use of a peer‐support‐group format; and (b) holding four cultural peer‐support groups made up of newly arrived refugees led by the previously trained settled refugees, following a peer‐mentoring format. We analyzed the mentors' narratives and written evaluations produced over the course of the intervention program. Mentor resilience increased during the first program phase and remained high and stable during the second phase. Mentor empowerment steadily increased throughout the duration of the program, and was fueled when participants became mentors to newly arrived refugees during the second phase. This study highlights how a peer‐support and peer‐mentoring approach is useful for enhancing the resilience and empowerment of refugees in receiving societies.