In this episode of Better Thinking, Nesh Nikolic speaks with Dr Ruth Wells about mental health and psychosocial support in humanitarian settings: what she learnt working alongside Syrian mental health practitioners, why context, rights and displacement matter as much as what happens inside someone’s head, and what “walking alongside rather than trying to fix” looks like in practice.
They talk about the pyramid of interventions used in global mental health, local and cultural ways of healing, the Caring for Carers online supervision program for practitioners in Türkiye, northwest Syria and Bangladesh, how funding and KPIs shape services, what service users say they value, and what Australian psychology might learn about lived experience and different forms of expertise.
Dr Ruth Wells is a Senior Research Fellow in the Trauma and Mental Health Unit, School of Psychiatry, UNSW Sydney, and a registered psychologist. Her research focuses on the social and cultural processes that shape individual and community responses to conflict and displacement. She has worked extensively with psychosocial professionals in Syrian refugee communities in Jordan, Türkiye and Iraq to culturally adapt clinical treatments and co-design research programs.
Ruth leads the Caring for Carers study, which looks at clinical supervision for mental health practitioners working with refugee communities in Türkiye, Syria and Bangladesh, and works on the Reassure study of Farsi- and Dari-speaking refugees and people seeking asylum in Sydney.
Connect with Ruth
- UNSW profile: https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/ruth-wells
- Caring for Carers: https://www.c4csupervisionmhpss.unsw.edu.au/
- Email: ruth.wells@unsw.edu.au (she offered it on air at 1:12:11)
- Reading list: Ruth offered to send readings after the episode (1:12:29) – add when received.
