Youth Coping with Oppression in Arab Spring and its Psychological and Socio-Political Dynamics: The Example of Palestinian Youth

Arab Spring exemplified how distress due to cumulative dynamics of oppression, poverty and chronic stress can result in mental health events that prime shared distress and trigger socio-political uprisings. Further, Islamist parties won the elections that followed the uprisings. Additionally resiliency of youth and will to survive is the source of their positive coping with oppression. Unfortunately, most of our understanding of and interventions with trauma are focused on past traumas perpetrated by individuals, current and ongoing traumas perpetrated by social groups, such as oppression and discriminations are mostly ignored. Why Arab Spring? And why religious groups became the dominant successors of the oppressors? Our goal of the present research is to build and test plausible theoretical models that explain the dynamics of such continuous collective identity trauma and investigate resiliency and coping strategies to related distress and suggest novel intervention strategies based on these tested models. The model we developed and tested on Palestinian adolescents assume that collective trauma of oppression prime collective identity to be more salient compared to other identities and trigger identity annihilation/ subjugation anxiety that drive mental health distress. On the other hand, will to survive drive different coping strategies with such distress. We tested the model on a sample of Palestinian adolescents. We measured all life traumas including oppression, poverty, as well as PTSD, Depression and complex PTSD. We used structural equation modeling. Results confirmed the general model and its alternatives and indicated that religious coping, political ideology, social support contributed to reducing mental distress, with religiosity the strongest predictor which may explain the electoral success of Islamists post Arab Spring. The implications of the results were discussed. We proposed new model of continuous trauma focused interventions for victims of such traumas