The presenting issues are domestic violence, poverty, loneliness, mental and physical health issues, immigration, homelessness, unemployment, separation and loss.
In partnership with further organizations, Nafsiyat provides a specific domestic violence intervention and one for women with immigration restrictions. We also support a mothers' self-care group, providing a space for mothers who have children of primary school age to engage on shared issues and get support.
Nafsiyat responded by employing a community link worker who provides practical support to clients on issues such as housing, immigration and employment. This role acknowledges the political, economic and social realities in the lives of clients and provides a link between the therapy and practical requirements, holding the tensions between the inner and outer realities of the clinical work.
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The European Union, right-wing ideologies in the ascendant, sets restrictive immigration and integration policies. Words reappear with disturbing associations, like ‘exile’, ‘refugee centre’ and ‘deportation’.
Old frontiers fell and dissolved and reappeared under new façades: from restrictions to immigration to internal discrimination; from economic globalisation to social exclusion.
We learn then of McBride's mother's life: of her parents’ immigration from Europe to America when she was a young girl, of her family's frequent moves within America, of her mother's disability from polio, her father's mistreatment of her mother, her sexual molestation at the hands of her father, the prejudice she experienced in society as a Jewish child, her teenage relationship with a black boy, leading to a pregnancy followed by an abortion and, finally, her leaving her home to marry her first husband, with whom she founded a church, giving up Judaism forever.
It is her ability, finally, to tell her story, and his ability to genuinely listen to her, that allows McBride to integrate fractured aspects of his self-identity and to develop, I believe, what Akhtar (Akhtar, 1995) has referred to (in the context of identity and immigration) as “… a psychic rebirth, the emergence of a new and hybrid identity,” even while noting that such an identity is “not a rocklike structure.
We hope to see the development of such a hybrid identity not only as the result of immigration but also in many other situations—for example, in children of interracial marriages, in children adapting in a healthy manner to the divorce of their parents, as well as in children of couples who are the same race but who have strikingly different socioeconomic backgrounds.
In a problematic response to the immigration, David detached himself completely from his home country of Kazakhstan, and from his dearly loved maternal grandmother since she was not Jewish.
Kogan summarizes for us here, in a very useful way, the understanding of immigration in contemporary analytic thinking.
She shares with us her thinking that David's immigration in early adolescence may have resulted in a split in his identity, which he described as a split between two countries and two cultures. Kogan believes that after the immigration David went into a frozen and unhealthy state of mourning in which he was stuck because he feared that if he remained connected to his old country he would be unable to integrate himself into the new country or to tolerate his profound sadness over loss of the old one.
Issues related to her father’s immigration to America, the fact that he had not been born and raised here, and the connection between this and my being an immigrant analyst whose ethnicity was different from hers, were also active in the treatment.
In 1936, an economic crisis triggered by Jewish mass immigration and land purchases led to another major Arab revolt.
It also limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, necessitating Arab consent for immigration and restricting Jewish land purchases. However, unlawful immigration to Palestine persisted until the end of British rule.
The Hungarian gentry's declining economic situation, the high literacy of
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Jewish children, the successful economic position of the Jewish population, the growing immigration of Jews—all seemed to be factors in the wave of active anti-Semitism, which lasted throughout a dramatic trial, until 1883.
Since government laws restricting immigration and working permits in the embracing countries (Great Britain, USA, New Zealand, Australia, several in South America) met with pressure exerted by public opinion and professional organisations (many refugees were lay analysts), enormous efforts were needed and these required a great deal of time.
In the case of the Greek survivors, this later period included immigration to British Palestine. In this way, it was hoped to carry the person through the most painful phase of traumatic recollections and not leave him “stuck” or immersed in these reminiscences.
Paula's resilency rested not only on
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her experience of identifying herself as a lesbian, but also on her experience of immigration from Latin America, another “experience of different.”
THE ULYSSES SYNDROME: IMMIGRANTS LIVING IN EXTREME SITUATIONS: IMMIGRANT SYNDROME WITH EXTREME MOURNING
On Differential Diagnosis: Relocating the Distress of Immigration from Psychopathology to the Wider Area of Mental Health in the Social Field
As we have commented in the introduction, a direct and unequivocal relationship exists between the stress limits which these immigrants experience and particular patterns of symptomatology; we call this “the Ulysses Syndrome” (Achotegui, 2002).
The Special Threat of Undocumented Immigration
We postulate that there is a direct, causal relationship between the enormous stress undocumented immigrants face in the twenty-first century and their symptomatology.
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CONCLUSION: IMMIGRATION POLICY IS MENTAL HEALTH POLICY
Is it not more dangerous to confuse these socially rooted mental health problems with depression, psychoses, adjustments disorders etc. by not defining them?
Social policy about immigration should be considered as a matter of mental health prevention.
Their plight has intensified with the immigration crackdown at the borders, and recent laws written in a way they cannot return here if they go home to visit.
Not only does defining it pose significant challenges, but there is also a wide-spread case of confounding anti-Muslim and/or anti-Islam sentiments with the frequently co-occurring prejudices of several other varieties; including racism, xenophobia, anti-immigration, class-based bigotry and even anti-Semitism, to name a few.
Finally, we have our fascinating interview, Amanda Dowd in conversation with Warren Colman, which covers Warren's richly woven life history, beginning with the immigration of his grandparents to Britain in the early 1900s from areas that were then Russia and Romania.
This reality is no less true in the current state of immigration. With our government policies in disarray, with traumatic separation of families across borders, with loss of protections afforded to those seeking refuge from persecution, poverty and illness, with the prevalence of homelessness, statelessness and the ravages of war throughout the world, how can we understand the impact of loss of home, loss of country, loss of self?
Benveniste offers a rich and detailed discussion of the Freud family's experience in the years leading up to World War II, culminating in their ultimate immigration to Great Britain. Freud, already ailing, was reluctant to leave Vienna, despite the increasing dangers facing Jews in Austria, but he was finally persuaded by his many friends and supporters, both at home and abroad, including Marie Bonaparte, who was instrumental in getting the family out of Vienna before the war broke out.
Eisold's work has led her to form the Immigration and Human Rights Work Group—under the auspices of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis—where she has trained others to provide services and continues to bring her work to the asylum-seeking community.
From the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing crises of immigration and violence at the borders, to gun violence, natural climate catastrophes and global unrest, many children are left dislocated, separated from their families or orphaned.
The use of statistical methods is not an absolute safeguard against the influence of such secular historical phenomena upon the medical observer, as these methods have been applied to immigrant women in a way that appeared to express social anxiety about immigration (Lunbeck, 1994).
Undoubtedly the ‘good news’ of the storyline spread rapidly and quickly in the great wave of immigration and the related industrial expansion of that epoch. the American population swelled from 17 million in 1840 to 31 million in 1860. the young nation was spreading west, on its rapidly expanding railway network, invading, purchasing and annexing to itself new vastnesses of territory and resources.
Žižek argues that the ‘reasonable racism’ of, for example, the present Coalition government in the UK, as it plays gesture politics on immigration to outflank the UK Independence Party, is primitive and barbaric racism nonetheless.
(2010) ‘Liberal multiculturalism masks an old barbarian with a human face’, The Guardian, 4 October, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/03/immigration-policy-roma-rightwing-europe?