“You don’t see a lot of Syrian psychiatrists at Yale,” Jefee-Bahloul says, laughing. “We were basically the only two.”

They had also been grappling with the same dilemma – how to use their mental health expertise to help Syrians and Syrian refugees. Both had left their homeland before the 2011 uprising to do psychiatry training in the U.S. and their distance from Syria’s descent into war weighed heavily on them.

“You read the news, but you are sitting very far away, so you feel like you can’t do much and there is a big sense of hopelessness,” Barkil-Oteo says. “Either you try not to think about it, or you occupy yourself with different things, or you try to do something.”

The pair formed a close friendship and professional collaboration that led to the launch in 2014 of the Syrian Telemental Health Network, an online platform helping mental health workers treating Syrians to access training and supervision from specialists around the world.

Mental health workers in around a dozen clinics in Syria and neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan use the U.K.-based platform to request clinical guidance from a volunteer network of expert Syrian psychiatrists based in Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East.

They can upload case information, including video and audio recordings of their patients, to the secure platform in order to obtain direction and advice from psychiatrists. The network sees about 10–15 cases a month, although the number fluctuates as clinics become overwhelmed with refugees, or have to close or relocate owing to the fighting in Syria.