5:00 am Tue October 28, 2014
Solving The Puzzling Mental Illness of Bhutanese Refugees
By Alex Smith
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For hundreds of years, Nepali people lived and worked in southern Bhutan, a country that earned notoriety in the 1970s when its king introduced the ?national happiness index? as an alternative to the more traditional measure of prosperity, the gross domestic product.
But in the early 1990s, a government campaign of harassment and what Human Rights Watch has described as ethnic cleansing led tens of thousands of Nepalis to flee to refugee camps in Nepal. In 2006, the United States offered to resettle some of the refugees. Since then, more than 75,000 have arrived in cities like Philadelphia, Denver and Kansas City.
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Studies have shown that yoga helps the brain, heart and nervous system. But why did it work in this case when physical therapy and medication failed?
That?s something LeMaster is still trying to understand. But the answer may have to do with nothing more mysterious than cultural familiarity...
