Gabriele Al-Barghouthi is the director of the Mondial Bonn Psychosocial Center, the contact point in the western German city for refugees with psychological and social problems.* When people ask her about the main tasks of her small team, she says: to stabilize people who have fled their home countries and often experienced violence.

That, she stresses, is anything but easy. "The long wait for the end of the asylum application procedure, the uncertainty, living in huge shelters without any privacy," Al-Barghouthi enumerates the difficult circumstances. "Many also experience the current political situation, racism in everyday life and exclusion. All things that would also affect healthy people," she adds.

The Psychosocial Center in Bonn is one of a total of 51 facilities in Germany that provide therapeutic care for refugees across the country. According to their umbrella organization, they supported almost 26,000 people in 2022, that's 3.1% of those who need help. According to Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD), 30% of refugees suffer with mental health problems.

These are figures that tend to get lost in the heated debate about the treatment of refugees. Following , the fatal knife attack in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria, in which a two-year-old child and a man were killed, immigration has become the number one topic in the campaign for the

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