Does resilience protect everyone equally? Tannous Haddad, Barel, and Tzischinsky (2026) answer with a striking finding: resilience buffers anxiety only among Arab citizens of Israel, not among Jewish participants. This discovery dismantles universal assumptions about resilience and demands a culturally grounded rethinking. We extend this pivotal insight to the Philippines, where Muslim Filipino and Indigenous Lumad communities endure a conflict landscape defined not only by violence but also by deep seated historical injustice, marginalization, and fractured state relations. Anchored in the socioecological model of resilience (Ungar, 2011), we argue that the original study’s distinction between anxiety as a “temporally diffused emotional state” and stress as an acute emergency response (Daviu et al., 2019) holds the key to understanding differential distress across ethnic lines. For marginalized minorities, anxiety is chronic, shaped by generations of exclusion and uncertainty. For majority populations, stress is acute, triggered by immediate threat. This distinction reframes war related mental health: interventions that treat anxiety as a universal condition risk failure where structural vulnerability goes unaddressed. We translate these findings into actionable policy grounded in the Philippine Mental Health Act (Republic Act No. 11036, 2018), calling for culturally congruent assessment, community embedded interventions codesigned with Imams, Datus, and traditional healers, and investment in local culture brokers who bridge trust gaps between communities and formal mental health systems. Resilience is not a trait to be built. It is a resource that communities already possess, waiting to be recognized and supported on their own cultural terms.
Colegado et al. (2026) studied this question.