Cultural Meanings of Trauma, Resilience, and Help-Seeking Among Internally Displaced Persons in Nigeria: Implications for Cross-Cultural Mental Health Practice.

Abstract

This conceptual paper examines the cultural meanings of trauma, resilience, and help-seeking among internally displaced persons in Nigeria, with particular attention to their implications for cross-cultural psychiatry, psychology, and mental health practice. Although forced displacement is often discussed through clinical categories such as post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and grief, these categories do not always fully capture how displaced persons interpret suffering, survival, and recovery within their own cultural worlds. Adopting a qualitative orientation, the paper engages interpretively with the ways psychological distress may be understood through religious belief, communal loss, family disruption, social stigma, moral endurance, and spiritual explanations of adversity. Drawing conceptually on Harmony Restoration Therapy, an African indigenous therapeutic perspective that understands wellbeing in terms of balance and harmony within the self, relationships, community, and wider existential world, the paper argues that displacement-related trauma should be understood not only as an individual clinical condition but also as a culturally mediated experience shaped by social dislocation and disrupted belonging. This perspective does not reject psychiatric diagnosis; rather, it questions its adequacy when detached from cultural context and lived experience. The paper contributes to global mental health discourse by arguing for culturally grounded assessment, community-sensitive trauma care, and more ethically responsive interventions for displaced populations in African settings.