Youstina Demetry sat across from a young Syrian refugee in Stockholm, guiding her through a digital therapy session that had been carefully adapted—not just in language, but in cultural texture. The words on the screen resonated because they spoke not only in Arabic but in the quiet rhythms of displacement, identity, and hope. Now, Demetry’s groundbreaking research at Karolinska Institutet suggests that artificial intelligence could help scale this kind of culturally attuned care, making it accessible to thousands more like her patient.
Mental health support for migrants often fails at the first hurdle: relevance. Even when therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are translated, they can feel alienating if they don’t reflect a person’s cultural worldview. Human-led cultural adaptation is effective but slow—sometimes taking months. Demetry’s team tested whether AI could accelerate this process without sacrificing quality. They presented Arabic-speaking refugees across Sweden, Denmark, and Germany with CBT materials adapted either by AI or by a clinical psychologist—without revealing the source. The result? Participants found the AI-adapted texts not only equally acceptable, but initially more culturally relevant than those crafted by humans.
This isn’t about replacing therapists. It’s about removing bottlenecks. In a follow-up clinical trial embedded in Demetry’s doctoral thesis, culturally adapted internet-delivered CBT led to remission in 57.7% of young Arabic-speaking refugees with mild to moderate depression and anxiety—more than four times the 14.3% remission rate in the control group. Improvements in post-traumatic stress, sleep, resilience, and overall well-being held strong even six months later. These numbers reflect not just clinical success, but restored agency among a group often left on the margins of mental healthcare.
The study focuses especially on ‘Generation 1.5’ migrants—young people who arrived during their formative years, straddling two worlds, often feeling fully at home in neither. Their struggles with mental health are shaped by this duality, yet traditional treatments rarely acknowledge it. By embedding cultural nuance into therapy content—whether through human or AI adaptation—the treatment becomes a mirror, not a lecture.
Demetry is cautious but hopeful. The technology, she emphasizes, must be developed within strict safety and quality frameworks. But the potential is undeniable: AI could help bridge the vast gap between the thousands of evidence-based treatments available in English and the scarcity of such resources in other languages. On June 12, 2026, she will defend her thesis at Karolinska Institutet, marking both an academic milestone and a step toward more inclusive mental healthcare. For millions of migrants navigating invisible wounds, that step could mean the difference between silence and healing.