From There To Here
Nooria Mehraby · 70 min
A former Afghan refugee who fled under Soviet-era persecution became one of Australia's foremost clinicians in refugee trauma — and her story proves that healing others can be its own path to healing.
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Nooria Mehraby left Afghanistan in 1987 as a doctor, forced to flee Soviet occupation and state persecution. She walked out of her country with her young children, her mother, and a smuggler who abandoned them at the border, taking everything she owned. After five and a half years working in Pakistani refugee camps, treating 60 to 70 patients a day with almost nothing, she resettled in Australia in 1993 with no credentials, no extended family, and no home.
Rather than requalify as a doctor, Nooria took a job as a bicultural counselor at STARS (Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors). She expected it to be temporary. She stayed for 30 years. Working with survivors of torture and displacement, she discovered something that had eluded her in medicine: a way to process her own loss while helping others rebuild theirs. Her lived experience as a refugee combined with three decades of clinical practice has made her one of Australia's foremost experts in refugee mental health.
Nooria's story is about what happens when you lose everything, including the person you were. It is about learning that the symptoms refugees carry, nightmares, flashbacks, isolation, are not signs of weakness but normal responses to extraordinary events. And it is about finding an integrated sense of self, not by erasing the past but by holding the old identity and the new one together. For anyone rebuilding after displacement, loss, or trauma, her work offers both understanding and a concrete path forward.
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