What is it about?
Refugees are vulnerable people, under stress because of pre-migration experiences of warfare and conflict, because of the perils of flight and because of the challenges of resettling in strange, sometimes hostile new environments. Resettlement counties like Canada can do little to alter the past, but we can do a great deal to help protect refugee mental health and promote well-being after refugees arrive. Using data from Canada's General Social Survey, we demonstrate that refugees experience lower levels of well-being than immigrants or other ethnocultural minorities. However, discrimination in Canada exerts the most powerful effect on well-being, more powerful than past traumas. The article discusses why refugees may experience more discrimination than other immigrants as well as the country's obligation to protect mental health from the risk-inducing effects of discrimination.
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Why is it important?
For many years, Canada has accepted about 25,000 refugees per year from other parts of the world. Refugee mental health has been generally overlooked in resettlement policy and practice. However, media attention to the horrors experienced by refugees from Syria and from Mynamar have increased awareness about the high rates of mental disorder among refugees and about the need to attend to mental health needs. Concern hs focused on providing services but the article illustrates that effective policy has an important role to play as well.
Perspectives
Mental health professionals and the public at large recognize that refugees have a high risk of developing mental health problems. The assumption is that this risk is due to pre-migration traumas and, therefore, that resettlement countries can do little to help other than try to provide more services. Services are important but if we attribute refugees' problems to what happened to them before they reach safety in Canada, it becomes too easy to abnegate responsibility for providing for refugee well-being after they arrive in this country. Rather than letting policy makers and service providers off the hook, research such as this shows that our responsibility to refugees doesn't stop when we admit them but that how we welcome them will affect their long-term well-being and their integration in Canada. It has been gratifying to receive a great deal of interest from younger immigration scholars and from the media -- wider understanding that what we do for refugees and when we do it makes a significant difference will help all of us improve our immigration system.
Professor Morton Beiser
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Predictors of positive mental health among refugees: Results from Canada’s General Social Survey, Transcultural Psychiatry, August 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1363461517724985.
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