Giving Compass' Take:

· When immigrants and refugees seek asylum, they often feel the need to exaggerate their stories or they will be ignored. News Deeply talks with a young man about his interview for asylum in Malaysia and explains that trauma is being used as a currency when it comes to the resettlement process. 

· Why is there a need to exaggerate stories and horrible experiences? How does the exaggeration and retelling of traumatic events impact the mental health of individuals?

· Refugees seeking asylum face many challenges that negatively impact their mental health.

Muddasir Ahmed Rajput didn’t know what to expect from his asylum interview with the United Nations in Kuala Lumpur. He worried he might have to take a lie detector test. He thought there might be a hidden camera in the room. When the U.N. resettlement officer asked why he left Pakistan, Rajput answered in the simplest way he could: “I told her the problem: There’s no future there.”

Rajput, 21, left his home in the Pakistani province of Punjab and requested asylum in Malaysia in 2013. He is part of the Ahmadiyya sect, a Sunni minority group deemed non-Muslim by Pakistani law. Members of the sect can be punished for blasphemy under the country’s penal code for practicing their religion in public.

“Did they hit you? Did they try to kill you?” he recalled the counselor asking. Though he didn’t have physical scars to show, he said he explained that being seen as a kafir or infidel in Pakistan meant persecution was ingrained in all aspects of society.

Rajput said being Ahmadiyya meant dealing with social stigmas in every aspect of his life. But he said people in his community fear that talking about this daily discrimination in their asylum interviews with the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) won’t be enough. They feel pressured to prove they’ve also been damaged by it. Rajput said this conflation of persecution with trauma within the humanitarian framework pushes refugees to use traumatic stories as a form of social currency.

“They feel that they have to exaggerate, or else they’ll be sent back.”

Dr. Renos Papadopoulos, a psychoanalyst from the University of Essex and U.N.consultant, said he’s seen through his work how refugees in Rajput’s position sometimes exaggerate their experiences to humanitarian organizations because they feel it will help them get the resources they need. “Our system sets them up for that,” he said.

Read the full article about the resettlement process by Betsy Joles at News Deeply.