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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ItemA country welcome: emotional wellbeing and belonging among Iraqi women in rural Australia( 2006-10)The Iraqi women in this study have made Australia their ‘home’ in the years following the Gulf War in 1991, and are the first generation to move to a small rural town in Australia. The experiences documented in this thesis are based on 15 months of ethnographic research, between March 2003 and June 2004, with twenty-six Iraqi women, sixteen service providers and members of the communities of which they are a part. The focus of the study is on Iraqi women’s experiences of resettlement, their sense of emotional wellbeing and belonging. By and large, studies of refugee mental health attribute ‘refugee suffering’ to pre-migration experiences, rooted to the cultures of peoples’ home countries, principally through war, persecution and trauma, and how this legacy impacts upon women’s emotional wellbeing and ability to belong in resettlement. In many ways, it is convenient for host countries to ascribe refugee mental health problems to pre-migration experiences because the power dynamics of integration, the complex micro politics and the consequences of encounters with the Australian system are made indiscernible. The emergent discourse not only obscures the economic, historical and social conditions that lie at the heart of processes of displacement, but also ignores, silences and speaks on behalf of refugees. This thesis demonstrates that Iraqi women’s articulations of their experiences of displacement and resettlement are anchored in and deeply affected by the material, legal and cultural circumstances of the local and national places they inhabit. Accordingly, their accounts of emotional suffering are in part framed within the experiences of war and persecution, both past and present, but they are also entangled and embedded in their contemporary realities resulting from multiple social barriers in resettlement, including cultural and religious racism, social invisibility, exclusion and being ‘othered’ in their daily lives, which impacts upon their wellbeing and sense of belonging in Australia. The experiences documented in this thesis not only privileges Iraqi women’s own understandings of displacement and resettlement and the ways in which they frame the reality of their lives, but also implicates the Australian system and structural axes of inequality in their resettlement experiences, in an attempt to move beyond western epistemological explanations that define the form and content of refugee lives as well as their illness and wellbeing.
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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.