Migration and Mental Health

Past and Present

Marjory Harper

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137529671
• eBook ISBN: 9781137529688
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

The relationship between migration and mental health is controversial, contested, and pertinent. In a highly mobile world, where voluntary and enforced movements of population are increasing and likely to continue to grow, that relationship needs to be better understood, yet the terminology is often vague and the issues are wide-ranging. Getting to grips with them requires tools drawn from different disciplines and professions.

Such a multidisciplinary approach is central to this book. Six historical studies are integrated with chapters by a theologian, geographer, anthropologist, social worker and psychiatrist to produce an evaluation that addresses key concepts and methodologies, and reflects practical involvement as well as academic scholarship. Ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, the book explores the causes of mental breakdown among migrants; the psychological changes stemming from their struggles with challenging life circumstances; and changes in medical, political and public attitudes and responses in different eras and locations.

Part I
Conceptual Approaches

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Marjory Harper (ed.)Migration and Mental HealthMental Health in Historical Perspective10.1057/978-1-137-52968-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Marjory Harper¹

(1)

School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

End Abstract

Definitions of both mental health and migration are ambiguous and contested, and any attempt to integrate the two phenomena is fraught with the challenge of comprehending and interpreting such constantly moving targets. The difficulties are not confined to changes over time and space, but involve many different understandings of the criteria for ‘normality’ and multiple perceptions of migration. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence of a perceived link between migration and mental illness to warrant a multidisciplinary evaluation, blending conceptual and empirical models and covering a broad chronological, spatial and thematic spectrum.

The approach taken by this study has both pedagogical and practical merit, as academic analysis from the disciplines of social geography, theology, history, literature and anthropology is integrated with experience-based insights from practitioners in the fields of social work and psychiatry. By demonstrating difference and complementarity, such dialogue expands the boundaries of scholarship and allows diverse disciplines to evaluate—and sometimes apply—each other’s insights. For instance, in scrutinizing similar triggers and outcomes, historians utilize reams of documentary evidence to investigate what happened—or did not happen; social policy tends to argue about what ought to happen following an analysis of the impact of policy and practice; and psychiatry addresses the aetiology and consequences of the problem from the standpoint of the clinician.

Historiography and Terminology

Within the constraints imposed by privacy legislation, the following chapters deploy a range of sources to explore past and present understandings of migration and mental health. These include personal diaries and letters, novels, psychiatric hospital records, health policy documents, deportation legislation and social work files. We need to begin, however, by setting the historiographical compass, particularly in terms of recent academic scholarship that considers the relationship between the two phenomena. Since the 1970s books and articles on migration and diaspora have proliferated, thanks to a combination of scholarly debate and public fascination with genealogy, with the emergence of migration institutes and diaspora studies centres simultaneously reflecting and stimulating such sustained interest.¹ The adoption of an international comparative approach was spearheaded by demographic historians like Charlotte Erickson and Dudley Baines,² but the research field quickly expanded from quantitative evaluations of the migrants’ economic background to include analyses of their personal testimonies, and investigations of individuals’ strategies of removal and settlement, as a range of writers used the written and oral testimony of participants in a quest to inhabit the migrant mind.³ Meanwhile the sociologist Robin Cohen has used the concept of diaspora as a tool to study transnational identities across a wide spatial, chronological and thematic tapestry that embraces trade, labour, colonization and involuntary exile.⁴

There is, however, no consensus about the definition of either diaspora or migration, the former being particularly controversial. Cohen’s approach has been dismissed by the historian Donald Harman Akenson, as ‘valueless’ and riddled with ‘palpably false historical assertions’, particularly that ‘diasporas of necessity are triggered by traumatic events’ and that a ‘return-to-the-homeland movement’ is an integral trait of diasporic groups.⁵ He also demonstrates the limitations of the argument that equates the Greek word diaspora with the Hebrew word galut, which signifies exile, and its claim that the term should therefore be applied exclusively to the enforced dispersions of the Jewish people. In the 1970s and 1980s the potent exilic motif was adopted by both the Black and Armenian Studies constituencies to describe their different experiences of traumatic banishment and longing for home.⁶ By the 1990s, however, scholars were beginning to define diaspora in terms of its original Greek meaning of a dispersal of population through colonization, and used it to refer to the uncontentious preservation of ethnic identities among voluntary migrants. It then became common currency in the wider study of demographic history, perhaps because of the pitfalls, bankruptcy and imprecision of terms such as ‘push and pull’ or ‘migration’. Akenson had a different interpretation, however, contending that ‘mushiness in meaning was a prerequisite for popularity’.⁷ Current interpretations of diaspora tend to encompass both catastrophic dispersal and a positive, persistent interaction between migrants, their places of origin and their destinations.

A migrant’s claim to be part of a diaspora involves an awareness of a group identity. Some migrants had a diasporic consciousness long before they packed their bags, and their wanderlust was perhaps galvanized by an awareness of their own scattered families and communities. Others waited until they had cut their moorings before they began to cultivate a self-conscious identity, possibly when the absence of their default culture in the new land made them more aware of its significance. Some migrants from peripheral economies or older age groups favoured the idea of a corporate ethnic identity, which might involve a semi-invented, or even spurious, world of collective memory and a passive culture of shared victimhood. In other cases, the production of memoirs by people who would never have applied pen to paper if they had stayed put reflects an awareness of the relationship between the individual and the community, particularly among women, who were more likely than male migrants to write reflectively and nostalgically.⁸ Alternatively, diasporic identities were constructed retrospectively by subsequent generations, from letters, artefacts and memorials.

Such differences in the diasporic consciousness of migrants remind us of even deeper ambiguities in the definition of migration. These ambiguities are nothing new, for human migration has always incorporated a range of options: single and multiple relocations; short distance and intercontinental movement; lifetime, serial, step and boomerang migration; and permanent return. But perhaps the issues have become more explicit since the mid-twentieth century, as a result of an intangible shift in perceptions of migration as a public, corporate—and sometimes community—phenomenon to a more atomistic, isolated and private process.⁹ Might the increased complexity of population movement in a globalized, hybridized world therefore be better conveyed by the more fluid and nuanced term ‘migrancy’? For globalization is not just an impersonal economic process that affects business and investment markets and facilitates the navigation of international employment opportunities. More negatively, the unprecedented potential for multiple and malleable identities opened up by ease of intercontinental travel and instantaneous communication means that rootlessness and instability have become the hallmarks of many of the ‘transilients’, rolling stones who are caught up in a lifelong saga of physical and psychological movement and are unsure of where to call ‘home’.¹⁰

Debates about the definition and significance of terms such as migration and diaspora are clearly relevant to any evaluation of the wellbeing of migrants, not least to their mental health. The dislocation or isolation caused by the absence of networks, coupled with uncertainties about identity, could destabilize not just modern transilients but also those who simply migrated from A to B in much earlier eras. Miles Fairburn has claimed that early colonial society in New Zealand was ‘gravely deficient’ because ‘community structures were few and weak and the forces of social isolation were many and powerful’. Adding that ‘bondlessness was central to colonial life’ and ‘the typical colonist was a socially independent individual’,¹¹ his controversial thesis raises questions about the degree to which migrants who could not cope with social independence were able to adjust to their new environment. Unprecedented isolation might well be combined with a determination to pretend to those at home that everything was going well and that the decision to migrate had been fully vindicated when, in fact, positive expectations had given way to negative and unsettling experiences.

The Antipodes have been the subject of the most up-to-date studies of the impact of migration on mental health. Angela McCarthy’s monograph, Migration, Ethnicity, and Madness: New Zealand, 1860–1910, challenges Fairburn’s colonial atomization theory by demonstrating the family environment in which insanity was often experienced and the diligence with which immediate family members visited their hospitalized relatives. Heavily rooted in institutional archives, her study is concerned with charting the way in which migration was perceived by patients and doctors, posing questions about issues of discrimination, marginalization and exclusion.¹² An earlier collection of 12 essays edited by McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne covers some of the same ground, but offers broader chronological coverage; expands the lens to incorporate Australia, North America, Fiji and Japan; and incorporates reflections on the migration of medical theories, attitudes and practices from Britain to the antipodean empire. Using a variety of case studies, it was one of the first publications to focus explicitly on the theme of migration as a factor in mental illness, a direction of travel that has been maintained by both McCarthy and Coleborne, and is further expanded by all the contributors to this book.¹³ Catharine Coleborne’s recent monograph, Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910, also adopts a helpful comparative approach by exploring in meticulous detail the formation of patients’ identities through the lens of the colonial asylum, with particular reference to issues of gender, class and ethnicity.¹⁴

Two previous monographs by Coleborne scrutinize insanity in colonial Australia and New Zealand, while an interdisciplinary collection of 18 essays she co-edited with Dolly MacKinnon addresses Australian mental health issues in both the colonial period and the twentieth century.¹⁵ Particularly useful in the transcolonial study, Madness in the Family, is Coleborne’s integration of the history of insanity with family history and her deployment of letters as a key source. While her insights into the lives of patients are absent from Alison Bashford’s evaluation of global population, hygiene, race and quarantine in the British empire, Bashford’s approach offers helpful perspectives on insanity and immigration restriction legislation, demonstrating how ‘the histories of the alien and the alienist are linked’.¹⁶ The human element reappears in the individuals who feature in Philippa Martyr’s short but engaging article on the deportation of lunatic migrants from Western Australia in the interwar decades.¹⁷

Bashford’s study of the mental health criteria of immigration exclusion legislation is one of eight chapters...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Conceptual Approaches
• 2. Historical Perspectives
• 3. Anthropological and Personal Reflections
• Backmatter