Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health

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.

Angela McCarthy is Professor of Scottish and Irish History at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and Associate Director of its Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies. She is the author and editor of several books on Irish and Scottish migration and of a pioneering article on migration, ethnicity, and madness published in Social History of Medicine (2008). Catharine Coleborne is Associate Professor in History in the History Programme, School of Social Sciences at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research interests include histories of families and institutions, mental health and oral histories, colonial psychiatry, ethnicity and gender. Her most recent book is Madness in the Family (2010).

1. Introduction: Mental Health, Migration and Ethnicity Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne 2. Mental Health and Migration: The Case of the Irish, 1850s-1990s Elizabeth Malcolm 3. Migration, Madness And The Celtic Fringe: A Comparison of Irish and Scottish Admissions to Four Canadian Mental Hospitals, C. 1841-91 David Wright and Tom Themeles 4. Migration and Madness in New Zealand's Asylums, 1863-1910 Angela McCarthy 5. Locating Ethnicity in the Hospitals for the Insane: Revisiting Case Books as Sites of Knowledge Production about Colonial Identities in Victoria, Australia, 1873-1910 Catharine Coleborne 6. 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 Maree Dawson 7. Medical Migration and the Treatment of Insanity in New Zealand: The Doctors of Ashburn Hall, Dunedin, 1882-1910 Elspeth Knewstubb 8. 'Lost Souls': Madness, Suicide, and Migration in Colonial Fiji Until 1920 Jacqueline Leckie 9. Between Two Psychiatric Regimes: Migration and Psychiatry in Early Twentieth-Century Japan Akihito Suzuki 10 'Suitable Girls': Recruitment of British Women for New Zealand Mental Hospital Nursing Post-World War II Kate Prebble and Gabrielle Fortune 11. The Impact of Migration on the Mental Health of Refugee Women In Contemporary New Zealand Lynne Briggs 12. Afterword: Madness Is Migration: Looking Back to Look Forward Bronwyn Labrum List of Contributors Notes Index