Treating all young people in crisis-affected settings as "traumatized" collapses important distinctions between normal responses to adversity, situational distress, and clinical need. Such oversimplification can misdirect resources toward inappropriate interventions and can alienate young people whose lived experience does not match clinical labels.

Resilience is more common than the trauma narrative suggests.

Mark Jordans of War Child, which works in conflict-affected settings, says he regularly encounters the assumption that everyone his organization serves must be deeply traumatized. "That's not the case,” he says.

In fact, Jordans observes, "a lot of children, a lot of adults, a lot of people, in the most difficult context, are able to be resilient with or without outside support. Sure, there are people that are heavily traumatized. There are people that are having severe difficulties in coping. But there's also a very large group that does manage to be resilient even in the most difficult of contexts."

When organizations assume that everyone in a difficult situation has been deeply harmed, they risk directing limited resources toward interventions that many young people don't need, while underinvesting in community-level support that might be a better fit.

Young people notice when their complexity is reduced.

Chris Barkley of Grassroot Soccer saw a version of this dynamic in HIV programming. A young person told the organization something that stayed with him: they felt like the entire HIV sector "had flattened their health to their viral load, and their mental health and wellbeing was something they felt no one was looking after."

That feedback helped push Grassroot Soccer to reconsider how they thought about the young people they worked with. Barkley describes the shift in terms of a design principle the organization now holds central: "We're trying to figure out how we leverage and build on the strengths that young people have rather than focusing on things that they don't have."

Deficit framing obscures community strengths.

Marine Burdel of Artolution warns of how refugee communities in particular tend to be perceived. She describes a pattern she calls "miserabilism" — the assumption that "being a refugee means being poor, helpless, and without resources, or that a refugee camp is a place of constant despair and tears. That couldn't be further from the truth." She adds, “This is why we do not recruit and deploy international artists to the different territories. There are already amazingly talented artists in our communities of interventions. They are there. I have seen incredibly hardworking people dedicated to their community and doing absolute wonders without any specialized background.”

Rather than importing outsiders, the organization identifies artists and community leaders who are already present and trains them to use creative practices for collective recovery and social cohesion. Burdel describes the approach as fundamentally additive: "Our work is complementary work — to transform and amplify what is already there."

In Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, for example, 20 Rohingya artists from within the refugee camp facilitate Artolution's programming. They know the customs, speak the language, and understand what their peers have experienced because they share that experience. Artolution provides a structure for putting their knowledge and capability to use.

Care systems that see the full person earn trust.

It’s important for therapeutic programs, too, to see not just a diagnosis or a set of symptoms but also the context the person is living in. Rochelle Burgess, a professor of Global Mental Health and Social Justice at University College London (and part of The SHM Foundation’s working group), urges care providers to engage with a young person's full reality, including their experience of racism, poverty, or structural violence.

"You're not going to really want to engage in a system that refuses to see the world in the way that you see it," Burgess says. She describes therapeutic modalities that acknowledge race as a factor but then treat it as outside the scope of the clinical work, an approach she sees as a failure of care rather than a matter of professional boundaries. "To deny someone's experience of the world as part of their therapy — you're not seeing the person in all the things that they are."

The outcome is similar to what Jordans and Burdel describe at the population level. When a young person brings their full experience into a care setting but an important part of it is underappreciated, the work is less useful to them, and they are less likely to stay engaged.

Burgess points toward an alternative framework called “cultural safety,” developed in work with indigenous communities in New Zealand, which begins by asking a person what they need in order to feel safe in a care environment. "You define what makes you safe," she says. "My job is to have some humility about my own knowledge to make space for your knowledge of the world." The approach doesn't replace clinical expertise, but it changes who gets to set the terms of the interaction.

What this means in practice

Young people in crisis-affected settings have varied experiences, innate strengths, and full lives that extend beyond whatever difficulty brought them into contact with a program or service. When organizations, funders, or care systems begin from a simplified understanding of who those young people are, they are more likely to offer responses that don't fit and less likely to sustain the trust needed for those responses to work.

Organizations working in these settings can start by recognizing that adversity does not affect everyone in the same way, that communities bring real capacity to their own recovery, and that young people are more likely to engage with programs and services that account for the complexity of their actual circumstances.