Melbourne School of Population and Global Health - Theses
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ItemDevelopment and evaluation of a training program in cross-cultural psychiatric assessment for crisis assessment and treatment teams (CATTs)( 2005-02)The aim of the current project was to improve the cross-cultural clinical competence of mental health staff in Victoria’s Crisis Assessment and Treatment Teams (CATTs) by developing, delivering and evaluating a training program in Cross-Cultural Psychiatric Assessment (CPA). The project was guided by a program logic framework. A literature review demonstrated cross-cultural differences in manifestations of mental disorders and disparities in mental health service provision to racial and ethnic groups, suggesting clinician bias, unfamiliarity with cross-cultural manifestations, or delayed help-seeking by ethnic groups. No research has been identified into crisis service provision to ethnic communities. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemMemory and resettlement: Somali women in Melbourne and emotional wellbeing( 2003)This thesis derives from ethnographic research that explored the lives of forty-two Somali women who migrated to Australia as a result of the Somali civil war. In particular, it explores Somali women's experiences of depression and emotional well-being. Studies of refugee mental health are frequently premised on an audible discourse that construes refugees as suffering predominantly from war, persecution and trauma. Further, the mental health ‘problems’ of refugees are firmly situated within the bodies and minds of those classified as refugees. The experiences documented in this thesis have a different focus, reflecting the ways in which Somali women's narratives encompassed their histories, changing social relations, and idioms of home and exile. Their accounts of depression lay partly within the language and experience of war and persecution, but emotional distress was frequently attributed to contemporary realities of family separation, loss of community cohesion, marginalisation, isolation, and the hardships of resettlement. Accordingly, this thesis is not an ethnography of a fixed place or social and cultural life, but provides a longitudinal account of a refugee population in Australia. The underlying focus of the research has been 'refugee mental health', however, analysis of the research findings has involved engagement with broader theoretical areas of historical memory, identity, community, home and exile, and transnationalism. The chapters that follow give an account of the idioms through which Somali women situate and give meaning to depression. In so doing, this thesis frames refugee mental health within the broader processes and interconnections of histories, displacement and resettlement, as well as the socio-political context of war.