Our experience with Syrian refugee patients at the child and adolescent psychiatry clinic in Gaziantep, Turkey

Abstract

Reporting from Turkey’s frontier with the civil war in Syria, we examined the demographic characteristics, psychiatric diagnoses and treatments for the Syrian refugee patients who have presented to Gaziantep University, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic through 2016 and the first half of 2017 retrospectively, having aimed to understand the special characteristics and needs of this novel patient group. Within a year and a half, we evaluated 51 children and adolescents and 25 (51%) had come from refugee camps, where primary healthcare services are available. Twenty-eight patients (54.9%) had special educational needs. Among our patients, there were only 15 (29.4%) girls. After our experience with refugee patients, we conclude that the role of primary healthcare services in reaching psychiatric treatment should be investigated for child refugees that special educational needs of Syrian refugees in Turkey needs urgent attention and that more research is needed to establish whether gender may be a factor in negligence of internalising symptoms by refugee families.

Keywords:

• Child
• mental health services
• psychiatry
• refugees
• Syria
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

None.

Compliance with ethical standards

Ethical approval was granted by Gaziantep University Ethics Committee on Clinical Research.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.