Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: International Perspectives, 1840-2010

by McCarthy; Angela

• ISBN13: 9780415895804
• ISBN10: 0415895804
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-22
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Most investigations of foreign-born migrants emphasize the successful adjustment and settlement of newcomers. Yet suicide, heavy drinking, violence, family separations, and domestic disharmony were but a few of the possible struggles experienced by those who relocated abroad in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and were among the chief reasons for committal to an asylum. Significant analysis of this problem, addressing the interconnected issues of migration, ethnicity, and insanity, has to date received little attention from the scholarly community. This international collection examines the difficulties that migrants faced in adjustment abroad, through a focus on migrants and mobile peoples, issues of ethnicity, and the impact of migration on the mental health of refugees. It further extends the migration paradigm beyond patients to incorporate the international exchange of medical ideas and institutional practices, and the recruitment of a medical workforce. These issues are explored through case studies which utilize different social and cultural historical methods, but with a shared twin purpose: to uncover the related histories of migration, ethnicity, and mental health, and to extend existing scholarly frameworks and findings in this under-developed field of inquiry.

Table of Contents

List of Tables and Charts	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xi
Introduction: Mental Health, Migration, and Ethnicity	p. 1
Mental Health and Migration: The Case of the Irish, 1850s-1990s	p. 15
Migration, Madness, and the Celtic Fringe: A Comparison of Irish and Scottish Admissions to Four Canadian Mental Hospitals, c. 1841-91	p. 39
Migration and Madness in New Zealand's Asylums, 1863-1910	p. 55
Locating Ethnicity in the Hospitals for the Insane: Revisiting Case Books as Sites of Knowledge Production about Colonial Identities in Victoria, Australia, 1873-1910	p. 73
A Degenerate Residuum? The Migration of Medical Personnel and Medical Ideas about Congenital Idiocy, Heredity, and Racial Degeneracy between Britain and the Auckland Mental Hospital, c. 1870-1900	p. 91
Medical Migration and the Treatment of Insanity in New Zealand: The Doctors of Ashburn Hall, Dunedin, 1882-1910	p. 107
'Lost Souls': Madness, Suicide, and Migration in Colonial Fiji until 1920	p. 123
Between Two Psychiatric Regimes: Migration and Psychiatry in Early Twentieth-Century Japan	p. 141
'Suitable Girls': Recruitment of British Women for New Zealand Mental Hospital Nursing Post-World War II	p. 157
The Impact of Migration on the Mental Health of Refugee Women in Contemporary New Zealand	p. 178
Afterword: Madness Is Migration-Looking Back to Look Forward	p. 193
List of Contributors	p. 203
Index	p. 207
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