The stakes of the study are considerable. Roughly one in three refugees worldwide experiences depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress, and these conditions can persist for decades after displacement. Yet the dominant frameworks used to understand and treat this suffering—what researchers call WEIRD psychology, shorthand for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic—tend to conceptualize trauma through a narrowly individual lens. This approach, the authors argue, overlooks the social, historical, and collective dimensions of refugee distress and produces siloed findings with limited relevance to the communities themselves. For the Eelam Tamil community, which fled a brutal 26-year armed conflict and genocide in Sri Lanka, the consequences are acute: Toronto now hosts the largest Tamil population outside Sri Lanka, an estimated 200,000 people, and the community is grappling with spiking suicide rates among its young adults—deaths that resurface intergenerational wounds largely unreported in the news.

Methodologically, the study is a third phase of a Decolonizing Participatory Action Research project, and its design reflects a deliberate refusal of extractive research practices. During early consultations, Tamil community members told the team they no longer wanted pathologizing studies about themselves or celebratory narratives of ‘superhero’ resilience. They asked instead for conversations about healing futures. The researchers responded with an arts-based sequence: participants first created memory-box autobiographies and body-map drawings—embodied, visual representations of lived experience—before moving into the study’s centerpiece, three virtual avatar-based community circles held on a 3D collaboration platform called FRAME. Each 90-minute circle brought together four participants, two Tamil peer researchers, and the lead author in an immersive space where everyone appeared as an avatar under a pseudonym.

The choice of avatars was not a gimmick but a technical and ethical solution to a real problem. Toronto’s Tamil community is tight-knit, and participants consistently asked whether they could remain anonymous when discussing sensitive topics. The platform also offered an antidote to the ‘Zoom fatigue’ that had accumulated through years of pandemic videoconferencing, fostering presence and creativity instead. Participants found the software intuitive—no one required a tutorial—and communicated verbally or through text chat. The circles drew methodological guidance from Indigenous talking-circle traditions and were intentionally loosely structured, with prompts following participants’ preferences. A licensed counsellor was available offline in case of distress, though no participant accessed that support. Notably, participants described the circles themselves as ‘a site of healing,’ with several asking for the sessions to continue beyond the study.

Through reflexive thematic analysis of the transcripts, field notes, and member-checking sessions, seven elements of community healing crystallized. The first is agency and self-determination. Participants described frustrating encounters with therapists who judged their decisions—such as maintaining contact with older family members—without understanding the collective logic behind them. One participant drew an analogy to harm reduction, noting that healthcare respects individual choice in addiction treatment but rarely extends the same courtesy to refugee family dynamics. The second element, historical trauma-informed care, addresses the exhaustion of having to explain genocide and its aftermath to every new provider. ‘I would want them to have some context that I don’t have to spoon feed,’ one participant said, ‘because I find it exhausting.’ Participants also warned that the label ‘trauma-informed’ is often applied vaguely, and that trauma may manifest somatically in South Asian communities in ways practitioners are not trained to recognize.

Cultural safety formed the third element: spaces where Tamil culture could be expressed with pride rather than translated for outsiders. Participants wanted Tamil practitioners and peer supports, while acknowledging that cultural safety is not guaranteed by shared identity alone—several noted that queer Tamils may not feel safe even within community-run spaces, an intersectional caveat the researchers take seriously. The fourth element, intergenerational connectedness and belonging, surfaced a poignant asymmetry: younger participants were hungry for elders’ stories, while parents and grandparents, protective by habit, guarded them from the worst. Participants proposed facilitated dialogues with community elders, noting that conversations flow more easily with those outside one’s own family, where judgment and tension give way to patience and active listening.

The fifth element, destigmatized access and delivery, generated some of the study’s most practical ideas. Shame around mental health—and classist stigma against those who seek community services—keeps many Tamil families away. Participants suggested embedding healing activities in spaces the community already trusts: temples, where sessions could be framed as religious programming for older generations, and even Tim Hortons, where Tamil workers already share vulnerable conversations over coffee. The sixth element, holistic and authentic approaches, produced a strikingly concrete inventory: Tamil-language classes that teach the vocabulary of mental health, communal cooking and gardening that celebrate rather than mourn the culture, music and dance workshops featuring porattam resistance songs at village get-togethers, financial literacy coaching to interrupt what participants identified as intergenerational financial trauma, an ‘Anna/Akka’ big-brother-big-sister mentorship program, and emotional wellness workshops teaching skills that many participants said their upbringing never provided.

The seventh element, truth telling as justice, proved the most politically charged. Participants argued that community healing cannot proceed while the genocide they fled remains publicly denied and their protests dismissed. Several drew painful comparisons to the global solidarity extended to Ukraine, contrasting it with the silence around state violence against Black and Brown populations—and, in one account, to arms supplied to the Sri Lankan government. For these young adults, acknowledgment, accountability, and reparations are not political luxuries appended to therapy; they are prerequisites for healing itself. The researchers frame this within liberation psychology, which privileges historical memory, testimony, and collective action over the forgiveness-first frameworks common in mainstream clinical work.

The authors synthesize these seven elements into what they call a praxis of community healing, ‘actively existing in a dialectic’: communities must simultaneously recognize and resist interlocking systems of oppression while cultivating radical hope for justice and liberation. Existing at either pole alone, they argue—drowning in resistance or detaching into fantasy—is detrimental; the act of holding both is itself a healing process. The study has limitations the authors acknowledge candidly: only one male participant took part, pointing to entrenched stigma around vulnerability for Tamil men, and queer Tamil representation was limited. The findings are context-specific and not generalizable, though the researchers argue the broader principles can transfer to other refugee communities if adapted through genuine partnership. As the first known use of avatar-based community circles in health sciences research, the method itself may prove durable—the lead author is already working with community organizations to establish ongoing virtual healing spaces. The study’s core message, distilled from its participants, is blunt and demanding: there is futility in saving parents from war only to lose their children to despair in a new country, and no ‘one size fits all’ intervention, however well-intentioned, can substitute for healing designed with, by, and for the community itself.

Subject of Research: Community healing and intergenerational trauma among second-generation Tamil refugee young adults studied through participatory avatar-based virtual reality circles

Article Title: Healing our intergenerational wounds: a praxis of community healing envisioned by refugee young adults engaging in participatory avatar-based community circles

Article References: Thambinathan, V., Wylie, L., Ganesh, D., Ramesh, L., & Kinsella, E. A. (2026). Healing our intergenerational wounds: a praxis of community healing envisioned by refugee young adults engaging in participatory avatar-based community circles. International Journal for Equity in Health, 25(1), Article 232. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-02993-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-02993-x

Keywords: refugee mental health, community healing, intergenerational trauma, Tamil diaspora, participatory action research, avatar-based circles, virtual reality, liberation psychology, cultural safety, historical trauma, decolonizing methodologies, Toronto