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Is Migration Good For You? A Psychiatric and Historical Perspective

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Migration and Mental Health

Part of the book series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective ((MHHP))

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Abstract

Does migration make one more or less prone to mental illness? Preceding chapters have addressed that question from different disciplinary perspectives, time periods and locations. It remains highly pertinent; in 2013, according to the United Nations Population Fund, 3.2 per cent of the world’s population (232 million individuals) lived outside their country of origin. A Gallup poll two years earlier, based on research in more than 150 countries from 2005 to 2010, found that approximately nine per cent of the world’s adults wished to move to another country permanently.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.unfpa.org/migration (date accessed 23 July 2015). See also Douglas J. Besharov, Mark H. Lopez, and Melissa Siegel, ‘International Conference News: Trends in Migration and Migration Policy’, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 32: 3 (Summer 2013), 655–60 http://umdcipe.org/reports/JPAM_Maastricht_Migration_conference_summary.pdf (date accessed 23 July 2015).

  2. 2.

    Neli Esipova, Julie Ray and Anita Pugliese, Gallup World Poll Number 43: The Many Faces of Global Migration (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2011), 17. http://www.migration4development.org/sites/default/files/mrs43.pdf (date accessed 23 July 2015).

  3. 3.

    George W. Brown and Tirril O. Harris (eds), Social Origins of Depression: A Study of Psychiatric Disorder in Women (London: Tavistock, 1978).

  4. 4.

    Ørnulv Ødegaard, Emigration and Insanity. A Study of Mental Disease among the Norwegian-born Population of Minnesota (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaards, 1932).

  5. 5.

    Elizabeth Cantor-Graae and Jean-Paul Selten, ‘Schizophrenia and Migration: A Meta-Analysis and Review’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 162: 1 (2005), 12–24.

  6. 6.

    Aetiology and Ethnicity in Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses.

  7. 7.

    Fearon et al., ‘Incidence of Schizophrenia’.

  8. 8.

    Paul Fearon et al., ‘Incidence of Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses in Ethnic Minority Groups: Results from the MRC AESOP Study’, Psychological Medicine, 36 (2006), 1541–50 http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/4110/1/Fearon_et_al_2006_final.pdf (date accessed 28 August 2015).

  9. 9.

    Frederick W. Hickling and Pamela Rodgers-Johnson, ‘The Incidence of First Contact Schizophrenia in Jamaica’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 167 (1995), 193–6.

  10. 10.

    James B. Kirkbride and Peter B. Jones, ‘Epidemiological Aspects of Migration and Mental Illness’, in Dinesh Bhugra and Susham Gupta (eds), Migration and Mental Health (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 15–43.

  11. 11.

    Fearon et al., ‘Incidence of Schizophrenia’.

  12. 12.

    Jutta Lindert et al., ‘Depression and Anxiety in Labor Migrants and Refugees: A Systematic Review nd Meta-Analysis’, Social Science and Medicine, 69: 2 (2009), 246–57.

  13. 13.

    S. G. Swinnen and Jean-Paul Selten, ‘Mood Disorders and Migration’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 190: 1 (2006), 6–10.

  14. 14.

    See, inter alia, Louise Ryan et al., ‘Depression in Irish Migrants Living in London: Case–control Study’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 188: 6 (May 2006), 560–6; Burçin Ünlü Ince et al., ‘The Relationship between Acculturation Strategies and Depressive and Anxiety Disorders in Turkish Migrants in the Netherlands’, BMC Psychiatry, 14: 252 (2014) http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-244X/14/252 (date accessed 23 July 2015); Shadia Rask et al., ‘The Association between Mental Health Symptoms and Mobility Limitation among Russian, Somali and Kurdish Migrants: a Population Based Study’, BMC Public Health, 15: 275 (2015) http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/15/275 (date accessed 23 July 2015).

  15. 15.

    Idoia Gaminde, M. Uria, et al., ‘Depression in Three Populations in the Basque Country—a Comparison with Britain’, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 28 (1993), 243–51.

  16. 16.

    N. Husain et al., ‘Social Factors associated with Chronic Depression among a Population-based Sample of Women in Rural Pakistan’, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 39: 8 (2004), 618–24.

  17. 17.

    George W. Brown et al., ‘Psychiatric Disorder in London and North Uist’, Social Science and Medicine, 11 (1977), 367–77. In another study covering a year-long period, Brown gives the incidence of depression in North Uist as ten per cent, possibly because he has conflated depression and anxiety (George W. Brown, ‘Medical Sociology and Issues of Aetiology’, in Michael Gelder, et al. (eds), New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  18. 18.

    Steven Stillman et al., ‘Miserable Migrants? Natural Experiment Evidence on International Migration and Objective and Subjective Wellbeing’, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit/Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn: IZA, 2012).

  19. 19.

    Stillman, ‘Miserable Migrants?’, 10.

  20. 20.

    Stillman, ‘Miserable Migrants?’, 14–15.

  21. 21.

    Stillman, ‘Miserable Migrants?’, 5.

  22. 22.

    Christian Loret de Mola, Sanja Stanojevic et al., ‘The Effect of Rural-to-Urban Migration on Social Capital and Common Mental Disorders: PERU MIGRANT Study’, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 47: 6 (June 2012), 967–73; L. Li, H. M. Wang et al., ‘The Mental Health Status of Chinese Rural–urban Migrant Workers: Comparison with Permanent Urban and Rural Dwellers’, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 42: 9 (September 2007), 716–22.

  23. 23.

    Carlos E. Sluzkie, ‘Migration and Family Conflict’, Family Process, 18: 4 (December 1979), 379–90.

  24. 24.

    Ødegaard, Emigration and Insanity, 74–7, 147–8.

  25. 25.

    Pat Bracken et al., ‘Psychiatry Beyond the Current Paradigm’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 201: 6 (2012), 430–4.

  26. 26.

    Allen Frances, Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life (New York: William Morrow, 2013). See also above, 22, 27–8, 30.

  27. 27.

    Marjory Harper, ‘Highlands and Islands, Demographic Change: Emigration’, in Michael Lynch (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 230–2.

  28. 28.

    See above, 14.

  29. 29.

    Highlands and Islands Enterprise, ‘Highlights—Building our Future across the Highlands and Islands’ (Inverness, July 2015), 4.

  30. 30.

    Thomas M. Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War: the Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 135–45.

  31. 31.

    See, for example, the testimony of Cathie Murray, in Marjory Harper, Scotland No More? The Scots Who Left Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Luath, 2012), 219.

  32. 32.

    This extract, and all other illustrations, are taken from anonymized case histories from James Finlayson’s own experience.

  33. 33.

    Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850–1900 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 130–3.

  34. 34.

    Margaret Wells, ‘Resilience in Rural Community-Dwelling Older Adults’, The Journal of Rural Health, 25: 4 (2009), 415–19. See also Brown, ‘Psychiatric Disorder’.

  35. 35.

    MS notebook of Sean O’Keefe, IFC, quoted in Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 132.

  36. 36.

    For an American parallel, see Meridith Hill Thanner, ‘Military Base Closure Effects on a Community: the case of Fort Ritchie Army Garrison and Cascade, Maryland’, unpublished PhD, University of Maryland, 2006; Meridith Hill Thanner and Mady Wechsler Segal, ‘When the Military Leaves and Places Change: Effects of the Closing of an Army Power on the Local Community’, Armed Forces and Society, 34 (2008), 662–81.

  37. 37.

    James Miller, The Dam Builders. Power from the Glens (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2003), 57–8.

  38. 38.

    Miller, The Dam Builders, 1723.

  39. 39.

    See ‘Hotel owner Shamsul Arefin jailed for trafficking workers’, BBC News, 24 July 2015 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-33653553 (date accessed 28 August 2015). In this case, a hotel owner in Argyllshire brought four men from his native Bangladesh to work as chefs in his establishment, at wages that were only a fraction of the contracted amount, and requiring them to undertake non-contracted duties at far longer hours than had been agreed. The exploitation was described as ‘a clear case of modern day slavery’.

  40. 40.

    Donald Meek, The Quest for Celtic Spirituality (Haddington: Handsel Press, 2000); Donald Meek, ‘Article Review: Celtic Christianity: what is it, and when was it?’, review of James P. Mackey (ed.), An Introduction to Celtic Christianity (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1989) in The Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology, 9: 1 (Spring 1991), 22–39.

  41. 41.

    Hugh Trevor Roper, The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014, originally published 2008).

  42. 42.

    Lillian Beckwith was an English novelist who lived for 20 years on the islands of Skye and Soay. Her whimsical accounts of life on the fictional island of Bruach appeared initially in seven short books, and were subsequently published collectively as A Hebridean Omnibus (London: Arrow Books, 1987) and A Second Hebridean Omnibus (London: Arrow Books, 1991).

  43. 43.

    Conflation of three case histories.

  44. 44.

    Office of Applied Studies, ‘The NSDUH Report: Depression among Adults employed full-time by occupational category’, (Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services, 2007) http://oas.samhsa.gov/2k7/depression/occupation.pdf (date accessed 4 August 2015).

  45. 45.

    Sean Damer, ‘Calling English incomers names is not only childish, it can also represent racism’, The Herald, 8 November 1997 http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12353765.Calling_English_incomers_names_is_not_only_childish___it_can_also_represent_racism/ (date accessed 5 August 2015). See also Murray Watson, Being English in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), particularly 126–45.

  46. 46.

    Between April 2001 and March 2006, 5505 overseas workers moved to the Highlands, of whom 2284 went to Inverness. Many of them are from new EU member states, and there had been a particularly big Polish influx (Steven McKenzie, ‘Diverse Cultures’ Impact on North’, BBC News, 8 July 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/highlands_and_islands/7495255.stm (date accessed 5 August 2015).

  47. 47.

    See, inter alia, Olga Kozlowska, David Sallah and Dariusz Galasiński, ‘Migration, Stress and Mental Health: An Exploratory Study of Post-accession Polish Immigrants to the United Kingdom’ (History and Governance Research Institute, University of Wolverhampton, 2008) http://www.wlv.ac.uk/media/wlv/pdf/Executive-Summary-Migration,-stress-and-Mental-Health.pdf (date accessed 4 August 2015).

  48. 48.

    ‘Highland Development (Scotland) Bill, 2nd reading’, House of Commons Parliamentary Debates, 5th series, volume 708, column 1095, 16 March 1965.

  49. 49.

    For details of the HIDB’s activities, see Ewen Cameron, ‘Highlands and Islands Development Board’, in Lynch, The Oxford Companion to Scottish History, 302.

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Finlayson, J., Harper, M. (2016). Is Migration Good For You? A Psychiatric and Historical Perspective. In: Harper, M. (eds) Migration and Mental Health. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52968-8_12

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