This is a past event
Image: Specimen Ward at Inverness District Asylum, 1903 (Highland Archive Service, Inverness, GB0232/HHB/3/12/12, by permission of NHS Highland).
This event is sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, and the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies.
Speakers and topics
Arnar Arnason: Between past and future: mental health and migration in IcelandAbstract: Iceland has one of the highest recorded instances of depression and anxiety disorders in the world. The prescription of medication for these is similarly high and patients tend to stay on medication for an unusually long time. Locally depression and anxiety are sometimes linked to the country‘s often adverse weather and its long dark winters, while efforts have also been made to establish genetic predispositions for depression and anxiety amongst the population. In this paper I consider mental health in Iceland in the context of internal migration from rural areas to the urban centre. Rather than taking such migration as problematic for mental health in its own right, I link the migration with local conceptions of the country‘s history, its past and its future. I argue for a link between depression and anxiety in Iceland and a perception of an enduring but uncertain present.
Marilyn BarberStories of Immigrant Isolation and Despair: Canadian Novels and Memoirs since 1850sAbstract: In The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter noted that representations of madness in literary texts were not simply reflections of medical and scientific knowledge, but part of the fundamental cultural framework in which ideas about insanity were constructed. In Canada, publicity recently given to two books, a memoir and a novel, has helped to highlight a cultural link between immigration and mental health problems. In her memoir, My Journey, published in January 2014, Olivia Chow, a Toronto MP and Chinese immigrant, reveals how her father suffered mental breakdown after migrating to Toronto in 1970. Then the annual CBC program, Canada Reads, looking for a novel that could change Canada, selected Cockroach as the runner-up for 2014. Written by Rawi Hage, an immigrant from Beirut, Cockroach depicts the dark side of life in Montreal’s immigrant community through the character of a self-described thief who failed in his suicide attempt so has to attend therapy sessions.
Drawing upon selected memoirs and novels from the 1850s to the post World War II era, the paper examines how literary texts have contributed to the portrayal of immigrant depression and mental breakdown in Canada. The main focus is on Irish and English migrants who for varying reasons attracted attention. The intersecting significance of ethnicity and gender is central to the analysis. Do the literary texts reflect or help shape contemporary perceptions of ethnicity as a contributing factor in mental breakdown? Similarly, what importance is attached, implicitly or explicitly, to gender roles and to concepts of femininity and masculinity? In addition, the paper explores the challenges attributed to the new environment and the changing place given to religion versus science in the understanding of mental breakdown.
Juliet Cheetham: Doing Harm or Doing Good? Some reflections on the impact of social policy and social work on the mental health of immigrants to the UKAbstract: Traditionally social policy in Britain has not included any special services for immigrants. The prevailing assumption is that insofar as they need social support (or qualify for it) then mainstream services will meet their needs. There is also the expectation that a largely working age group, with the ambition and resources to migrate, will be a resilient group needing little help.
In reality the stresses and demands of migration ( poverty, extreme hard work, isolation, separation, discrimination, cultural alienation - to name but a few) can be expected to have a negative impact on mental health. Depending in part on the motivation for migration significant rates of depression and anxiety states might be expected, although there is little reliable data on their incidence. This may indicate immigrants’ determination to cope, their ignorance or fear of available services, and lack of interest in the host population.
This paper takes a broad approach to mental illness among immigrants in the community where it may well be unrecognised and untreated. It is a frustration that, compared to papers dealing with hospital populations, there is so little hard data, except that which immigrants describe to us or which practitioners observe.
I will use case studies, from my own experience as a social worker, to illustrate severely stressful situations to which the social services and social work response exacerbated the problems with which immigrants were struggling. It is a reasonable expectation that this could have had a negative impact on mental health. Some of these case studies are quite old but I hope we can consider whether they have parallels today.
Happily in the last two decades or so there has been greater interest in defining and promoting a more humane, rights based and effective approach in working with immigrants confronting personal and social problems. Again I will use examples to discuss their various formats – specialist, mainstream, professional, self-help and so on - and the dilemmas these can sometimes raise.
Finally, we may want to reflect on the likely implications for support for immigrants in the present political climate.
Lisa ChiltonThe case of the missing subject: Immigrants and mental health in official Canadian correspondence, 1820s-1890s.Abstract: Historians of migration working on sites of reception throughout the British Empire have noted that the turn of the twentieth century began a period of intense scrutiny of the mental health of immigrants by state authorities. Canadian officials responded to the highly publicized concerns of medical experts and other interested parties about the arrival of mental ‘defects’ and people with past histories of personal or familial mental ‘fragility’ by creating legislation that allowed for the exclusion and deportation of such individuals. In the case of Canada, a series of acts (1902, 1906, 1910), borrowing heavily from other states’ examples, served as key moments at which such legislation came together.
In this paper I explore the response of Canadian officials and affiliated medical parties to cases of immigrants’ mental ill health over the course of the nineteenth century. There is no shortage of evidence to suggest that immigrants during the nineteenth century were sometimes challenged physically and emotionally beyond endurance, and that the psychological fall out could be significant. And yet, there is remarkably little emphasis in official reports and correspondence on this subject prior to the end of the nineteenth century. This paper looks at a sample of cases where officials registered their notice of mental health problems, it considers the evolution of official responses to such cases, and it considers the issues involved in the official shift towards a more assertive rejection of immigrants displaying signs of psychological difficulties.
Catherine Cox and Hilary MarlandTransatlantic Links? The ‘wandering Irish’, migration and institutionalization in nineteenth-century LancashireAbstract: This paper explores the migratory patterns of Irish patients into and through the Lancashire asylum system in the second half of the nineteenth century. Accounting for a large proportion of admissions (up to half in some years) from the late 1850s to the end of the century, not surprisingly, asylum medical superintendents referred specifically to the pressure placed by the Irish on what were rapidly to become severely overcrowded institutions. Many Irish migrants ended up in asylums after prolonged periods spent ‘wandering’ across England or the globe, through America, Australia and India, in search of work, serving in the army and slipping in and out of community support networks. Pressure on the asylums from those migrating directly from Ireland was exacerbated by the intake of lunatics returned from North America to Lancashire, a source of great frustration for Poor Law authorities and asylum superintendents, and symbolic of wider issues concerning governance, settlement and repatriation. Representations of the Irish as a ‘tramping people’ dovetailed with the reality of asylum admissions, and Irish patients in Lancashire asylums were distinguished in case notes for their violence, criminality, physical decrepitude, vagrancy and disorganised lives. This paper will couple the big picture of the impact of the Irish on asylums and their management to individual stories of movement through migration, the search for work, destitution and confinement.
Waltraud Ernst: On Being Insane in Alien Places. Case-Histories from British India, c. 1800-1880
James Finlayson Migration is good for youAbstract: Migration, people moving to stay in a new area, is an extremely common phenomenon. Perhaps as much of 10% of the world population can be regarded as migrants. Often immigrants are perceived negatively by the receiving culture and have been viewed as having a high level of mental health problems. Studies from the past tended to confirm this and have been accepted as generally showing the problems that migrants face.
I have reviewed the studies and found that there are problems with them. Psychiatric diagnoses are sometimes unclear, the samples examined are not always clearly defined, the different service provision in different areas is often not taken into account, the changes in behavioural patterns in different areas are not often acknowledged and sometimes the early studies are misquoted. The complexity in reasons for migration is often not acknowledged.
I have looked at the various kinds of migration that I have observed as a doctor and psychiatrist working in remote areas in the North of Scotland . I have found that I can identify at least 16 different types of emigration and immigration from and into the area I have worked in. Of particular interest is the new phenomenon of a significant number of people who, having the economic freedom to do so, or at least the perceived freedom to do so, move to a rural environment in the hope of achieving greater happiness. I discuss how, in the light of the complexity of reasons for migration, the effect of migration on mental health is also likely to be complex and dependent on the reason for migration.
It is likely that most migrants leave home for reasons of physical security or increased economic prosperity. Sometimes the effects of migration can be surprising. To my knowledge there is only one situation where, what was in effect a controlled experiment was carried out when a random group of people were allowed to emigrate from Tonga to New Zealand. It has been reported that those who went to New Zealand had better indicators of good mental health than those that were not fortunate in the random draw to pick those who would go. I discuss the implications of this study for the understanding of migrant mental health.
Marjory HarperEthnicities and Environments: Perceptions of Mental Illness among Scottish and Scandinavian Settlers in North America, c. 1870 – 1930Abstract: During the nineteenth century, Ireland, Norway and Scotland headed the European table of emigrant-exporting countries. While the catastrophe of the Famine dominated the Irish narrative, Scottish and Norwegian emigration was primarily a quest for betterment, often triggered by the glowing assurances of recruitment agents. But the reality did not always match the rhetoric, and difficulties in adjustment were commonplace. The destabilising impact of disillusionment and failure is woven into settlers’ correspondence, official reports, and the admission registers and case files of mental hospitals. It is also a recurring theme in fiction.
This paper utilizes a range of sources to examine contemporary perceptions of the causes and consequences of mental illness among Scottish and Scandinavian emigrants to North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To what did the settlers themselves, host communities, immigration officials and doctors attribute mental breakdown? Was ethnicity identified as a predisposing factor? How much significance was attached to the challenges of coping with unexpectedly alien environments? How did the settlers themselves, and the host societies, respond to the experience of mental illness?
Ellen ScheinbergCanada’s Deportation of “Mentally and Morally Defective” Female Immigrants after the Second World WarAbstract: This paper examines the experiences of female immigrants who arrived in Canada following the Second World War -- between 1946 and 1956 -- who were issued deportation orders based on mental health offences within the 1927 and 1952 Immigration Acts. During the period under analysis, there were a number of pivotal events that will be addressed in the presentation that significantly changed the deportation process as well as interpretations of insanity. These included the introduction of the new act in 1952, the addition of homosexuality to the insanity clause, and finally, the restructuring of the Immigration Appeal Board in 1956.
In contrast to earlier Canadian studies that focus on government policy or male deportees accused of political crimes, this paper examines the female immigrants who were targeted for mental health and related moral offences. This study also relies on a variety of sources, including 375 deportation case files produced by the Immigration Branch of the federal government – 23 percent of which document female deportees accused of mental crimes. This rich, untapped source enables the author to move beyond the perspective of the male bureaucrats by bringing some of the diverse voices of female deportees to the fore. Despite the fact that the experts and state often worked in tandem to label and expel immigrant women who failed to adopt the prescribed gender roles, values and behaviour of the day, some of these women were able to fend off these attacks and remain in Canada.
Sergei Shubin: Theoretical perspectives on ‘madness’ and migrationAbstract: In this paper I carefully approach the term “madness”, as well as its equivalent “mental health”, in relation to migration. Drawing on the series of historical studies of the place of the “mad” and the assumptions about their “wandering” existence, I explore the construction of philosophical and social limits associated with “madness”. By studying the changing practices of classification, the paper establishes the ways in which migrants step beyond the limits linked to “madness”, which are used as signifiers of their difference. Here I explore the experience of migration as broader “being-on-the-move” (after Heidegger, 1996), living with the opposites, facing simultaneously in different directions, inhabiting spaces “in-between” different social norms (language and symbols of the sending and receiving populations). Migrants’ very existence as “subjects in transit” (Clifford, 1994) is therefore tantamount to “madness”, while the anxiety and fears associated with cross-border movement also contribute to the development of alternative ways of being which gets named as “madness”.
The paper therefore explores the connections between migrant’s being-on-the-move and a pre-set grid of definitions and treatments of madness, which often deny the alternative visions and sensibilities of those considered “mad”. It studies migrants journeying through the experiences of “unhomely” or ”uncanny” to the place of “home” (rediscovery of wonder), as well as experiences of placelessness arising from migrants’ inability to come to terms with disconnectedness from the measurable and objective space-time of the public world (after Heidegger, 1996). Being attuned to “madness” in the context of migration therefore implies a two-fold gesture. First, it requires an analysis of the process of migration which blurs the boundaries between the polarities of certainty and ambiguity, reality and imaginary, temporary and permanent (being hopelessly lost) – a process which can overwhelm migrants and cause a bout of madness. Second, it also suggests the need to study the practices of “silencing” of the mad (Foucault, 1965) in migration alongside the challenges to express different orders, possibilities and alternative ways of thinking developed by troublesome and troubling mobile individuals.
John Swinton: Unravelling Mental Illness: what exactly are we talking about?Abstract: This paper will lay out a context for the conference by exploring exactly what we mean when we talk about ‘mental illness’. Historically the phenomenon we now describe as mental illness has taken various different forms and even today’s diagnoses differ profoundly across cultures and contexts. Mental illness is clearly socially constructed, although that does not of course mean that it is not ‘real.’ It does however seem clear that the West in general and the US in particular are exporting understandings of mental illness that have not been previously available within a global context. Such an observation may have some interesting implications for the study of migration and mental health. The paper will explore some of the complex dimensions of the nature and development of mental illness and offer some key concepts and perspectives that can help the day’s conversations.
Programme
Thursday 10th April
10.00 – 10.45 Tea and coffee
10.45 – 11.00 Introductory remarks
11.00 – 12.30 Panel 1
John Swinton: Unravelling Mental Illness: what exactly are we talking about?
Sergei Shubin: Theoretical perspectives on ‘madness’ and migration
12.30 – 1.45 Lunch
1.45 – 3.30 Panel 2 Arnar Arnason: Between past and future: mental health and migration in Iceland Waltraud Ernst: On Being Insane in Alien Places. Case-histories from British Isles, c. 1800-1880
3.30 – 4.00 Tea and coffee
4.00 – 5.30 Panel 3 Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland: ‘Transatlantic Links? The ‘wandering Irish’, migration and institutionalization in nineteenth-century Lancashire
7.00 pm Dinner at Rustico’s, Summer Street, Aberdeen
*****
Friday 11th April
9.00 – 10.30 Panel 4 Marjory Harper: Ethnicities and Environments: perceptions of mental illness among Scottish and Scandinavian settlers in North America, c. 1870-1930 Marilyn Barber: Stories of Migrant Suffering and Depression: Canadian novels and memoirs
10.30 – 11.00 Tea and coffee
11.00 – 12.30 Panel 5 Lisa Chilton: The case of the missing subject: immigrants and mental health in official Canadian correspondence, 1820s-1890s Ellen Scheinberg: Canada’s deportation of ‘mentally and morally defective’ female migrants after the Second World War
12.30 – 1.30 Lunch
1.30 – 3.00 Panel 6 Juliet Cheetham: Doing Harm or Doing Good? Some reflections on the impact of social policy and social work on the mental health of immigrants to the UK James Finlayson: Migration is good for you
*****
Biographies
Juliet Cheetham is a social worker. Her first job as a probation officer in Brixton, South London, in the 1960s, inspired a long lasting interest in migration and the associated social policies. She pursued these through teaching, research and writing as a lecturer in applied social studies and a Fellow of Green College at Oxford University. She returned to Scotland in 1986 as a professor at Stirling University to establish the Social Work Research Centre, funded by the ESRC and the Scottish Office, to evaluate the effectiveness of social work services. She then returned to practice as the Social Work Commissioner with the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland. After this she worked as an inspector for the Social Work Improvement Agency. She now works part time for the Scottish Care Inspectorate and the Mental Health Tribunals for Scotland.
Lisa Chilton is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Prince Edward Island. Her publications include works on British emigration, Canadian and Australian immigration, and gender relations. She is currently working on a variety of overlapping research projects that explore the intersections between British imperialism and cultural identity reformations in Canada from the late 18th century to the 1930s. In her spare time, she is heavily involved in supporting students who came to UPEI through the refugee student programme managed by the World University Service Canada.
Catherine Cox is a Lecturer in Medical History at University College Dublin and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, which she co-founded in 2006. She is author of Negotiating Insanity in the Southeast of Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2012), as well as edited collections on medical history and the history of adolescence in Ireland. She has published articles examining institutionalisation in Irish society and on nineteenth-century medical practitioners. Her research interests span medical practice and the medical marketplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mental illness in Ireland and England, alternative healing cultures and the relationship between art, disease, the body and medical education in the early nineteenth century. She is currently working with Hilary Marland on a Wellcome Trust funded project on Irish migration and mental illness in nineteenth-century Lancashire, and is also developing new work on artistic representations of patients and disease in Ireland, the subject of her next project.
Waltraud Ernst is Professor in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University. She has published widely on the history of psychiatry, with a particular focus on nineteenth and early twentieth-century British India. She is the author of Mad Tales from the Raj (1991; 2010) and Transnational Psychiatries and Colonialism (2013). Her edited books include Work, Psychiatry and Society (forthcoming 2014), Crossing Colonial Historiographies (2010), Transnational Psychiatries (2010), The Normal and the Abnormal (2006), Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity (2002), and Race, Science and Medicine (1999).
James Finlayson was born in Newtonmore in the central Highlands of Scotland. He studied medicine at the University of Aberdeen, and subsequently trained in psychiatry there and in Perth and Inverness. For sixteen years he was a general practitioner in the Isle of Harris, while doing a weekly psychiatric clinic on a neighbouring island. Thereafter he was a consultant psychiatrist in Inverness for ten years. He now works as a medico-legal specialist in psychiatry and, in a voluntary capacity, as manager of Dion Skye, a Christian charity working with people struggling with addictions. He lives on the family croft in Braes, Isle of Skye, the site of a significant clash in the Highland land wars of the 1880s. He spends his spare time working his croft, enjoying his grandchildren, preaching in local churches and rearranging the books in his library.
Marjory Harper is Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen. She has published widely on the history of emigration, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and she makes extensive use of oral testimony in her research and publications. Her most recent book, Scotland No More? The Scots who left Scotland in the twentieth century (Edinburgh, 2013), was awarded the Frank Watson Prize by the University of Guelph and her previous monograph, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London, 2003), won the Saltire Prize in 2004. She has co-authored (with Stephen Constantine) Migration and Empire (Oxford, 2010), a Companion Volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire. She is currently working on a monograph of Scots in New Zealand, as well as developing a new line of research in migration and mental health.
Hilary Marland is Professor of History at the University of Warwick and founding Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine, which she ran from 1998 to 2009. She is author of Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Palgrave Macmillan 2004) and Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield, 1780-1870 (Cambridge University Press 1987, 2008), as well as several edited collections on the history of midwifery, alternative medicine, medical practice in early modern England and the Netherlands, maternity and infant welfare, and child health. Her research interests span medical practice and the medical marketplace in the nineteenth century, women and mental illness, alternative healing cultures, the relationship between youth and health, and the history of childbirth and midwifery. She is currently working with Catherine Cox on a Wellcome Trust funded project on Irish migration and mental illness in nineteenth-century Lancashire, and is also developing new work on domestic practices of medicine and healing in nineteenth-century Britain, the subject of her next monograph project.
Ellen Scheinberg is the President of Heritage Professionals, a heritage consulting company in Toronto that delivers archival, museum and information management services. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa in 2007 and produced a dissertation entitled “The Undesirables”: Canadian Deportation Policies and their Impact on Female Immigrants, 1946-1956”. She has published many articles during her career within journals and books in the areas of archival studies, women’s history, labour history, Canadian Jewish studies and immigration history. In addition to working on publications related to her dissertation topic, she is also currently writing a coffee table book documenting the history of Toronto’s Jewish community from its inception to recent years, as well as an interdisciplinary book comprised of a collection of articles examining Toronto’s first immigrant neighbourhood, St. John’s Ward.
Sergei Shubin is an Associate Professor in the department of geography and Associate Director of the Centre for Migration Policy Research at Swansea University, UK. His recently completed projects focused on construction of “ideal” migrants, physical and imagined travel in Brazil and Bolivia, socio-spatial exclusion of mobile groups of migrants and travellers in the UK, and different times of migration. In collaboration with two colleagues from Glasgow University, Sergei is currently leading the ESRC-funded research project on social security and settlement of Eastern Europeans in Scotland
John Swinton is Professor in Practical Theology and Pastoral Care in the School of Divinity, Religious Studies and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen and an honorary Professor of Nursing at the University's Centre for Advanced Studies in Nursing. He has a background in mental health nursing and healthcare chaplaincy and has researched and published extensively within the areas of ageing, dementia, mental health and illness, spirituality and human well-being and the theology and spirituality of disability. He is the Director of Aberdeen University's Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sdhp/centre-for-spirituality-health-and-disability-182.php), and Co-Director of the University's Kairos Forum (http://thekairosforum.com/). His publications include: Dementia: Living in the Memories of God (2012); Raging With Compassion: Pastoral responses to the problem of evil (2007); Spirituality in Mental Health Care: Rediscovering a "forgotten" dimension. (2001); Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness (with Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, 2008); Practical Theology and Qualitative Research Methods (with Dr Harriet Mowat, 2006).
For further information please contact Marjory Harper:m.harper@abdn.ac.uk
Note for speakers on publication of proceedings
There have been preliminary discussions with Liverpool University Press about the possibility of publishing the conference proceedings in the series, “Migrations and Identities”. As a first step, LUP has asked that a publishing proposal form be submitted, which includes a contents list with a detailed synopsis of each chapter. If you would like your paper to be considered for publication (and I hope you will!) please could you send me a synopsis of at least 400 words? I’d be grateful if you could do this by the end of March.
Marjory Harper m.harper@abdn.ac.uk
- Hosted by
- RIISS, University of Aberdeen
- Venue
- HMG1, Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds