Barbara Katz Rothman Tracy Chu CUNY Graduate School University Center
The health and well being of refugees is most often framed as mental health pathology stemming from their previous trauma and expressed in the language of stress, anxiety, depression, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In many respects, the refugee experience itself has become subsumed by a medical etiology or the "naming and framing" of trauma within the paradigm of Western psychiatry and medical pathology. As a consequence of ascribing a socially-bound sick role little attention is focused on the post migration structural needs affecting the mental health and well-being of refugees, e.g., the need for employment and housing. Further, little attention is focused on their day-today lives and experiences as immigrants in the context beyond individual-level mental health. In this dissertation research, the co-PI will conduct 20-30 in-depth interviews with primarily Tibetan and African refugee survivors of torture and war trauma living in New York City and complete a quantitative analysis of approximately 740 medical clinic intake files from the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. These data will be used to study the role of post-migration factors (such as current economic deprivation, unstable housing, tenuous legal status), in predicting poor mental health. Employing a social construction of illness perspective the co-PI will look at how refugees themselves conceptualize distress or problems in their lives (as medical, spiritual, individual problem, family problem, etc.), and how this may conflict with the underlying cultural, social, and medical model assumptions made by clinicians. Finally, this research allows the co-PI to look critically at the role of race and ethnicity in both the larger social construction of mental health among refugees -- including dimensions of racialized global politics, differential international intervention and humanitarian aid, etc. and the role of race and ethnicity in immigrant assimilation, specifically locating Tibetan and African refugees in the larger racial landscape of New York City.
This research will advance an understanding of well being among refugee survivors of torture and war trauma that transcends medical/psychological paradigms of trauma. It will broaden the understanding of a largely underserved population of Tibetan and African refugees in NYC, illuminating their mental health outcomes and structural non-medical needs, as well as their modes of immigrant incorporation and negotiation of race and ethnicity.
