"Psychosocial perspectives on migrants and refugees"

Issue 55 of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Mobility (REMHU) features the dossier "Psychosocial perspectives on migrants and refugees". In his editorial "They're not just numbers", Roberto Marinucci, Deputy Director of CSEM and Editor-in-Chief of the journal, reinforces the importance of the human dimension in migratory dynamics, which cannot be reduced to statistical data or abstract collective categories.

For Marinucci, the psychosocial approach sees migrants in their subjectivity. "The psychosocial approach looks at the continuities and, at the same time, the specificities of the trajectory of each human being on the move. It elucidates how beings belonging to the one humanity can follow such divergent and diverse geographical and existential paths. Subjective paths of ruptures and reconstructions, of failures and conquests."

The various articles that make up the dossier also shed light on challenges related to the mental health of migrants, who often undergo a reconfiguration of their identities as a result of difficult experiences in their countries of origin, crossing and arrival. The dossier also takes care not to pathologize the migratory experience.

With this in mind, the REMHU articles point to possible ways of offering help without interfering in the times and spaces of the inner reconstruction of the subjects involved, pointing to practices of welcoming and listening, as well as social inclusion policies.

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