Digital Mental Health in Trauma and Migration: Opportunities and Challenges

The combination of forced migration and traumatic experiences can lead to major mental health challenges for refugees, asylum seekers, traumatized migrants, and migrant populations. Digital mental health (DMH) interventions, including Internet-based interventions, chatbots, mobile applications, wearable technologies, and game-based interventions, represent easily accessible and scalable tools to engage migrant populations. DMH interventions have shown encouraging results in helping people manage their depression, anxiety, trauma, and emotional dysregulation symptoms, with evidence extending across diverse cultural settings. The cultural and migrant adaptation of DMH interventions represents an opportunity to increase mental health access and engagement among refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants. The present chapter outlines currently available DMH interventions adapted for migrants and refugees for managing the psychological consequences of their trauma, including managing anxiety, depression, and PTSD. We provide a critical overview of opportunities and challenges. Overall, the development of effective DMH interventions necessarily requires cultural and ethnoculturally sensitive adaptation, as well as ethical considerations and a user-centred design, to develop more tailored, effective, and feasible digital solutions. The future requires sustainable models that are co-designed to meet the specific needs of displaced populations.