Challenges to Providing Mental Health Care in Immigration Detention
Global Detention Project Working Paper No. 19
By Stephen Brooker, Steve Albert, Peter Young, and Zachary Steel
December 2016

The global expansion of immigration detention systems creates an imperative for the mental health community to develop specialized models and practices of care. The harmful psychological effects of immigration detention and repeated findings that this practice results in breaches of human rights principles create a complex care setting. The authors employ lessons learned from their professional experiences in Australia, findings in specialized literature, and testimony from health workers and detainees to argue that immigration detention exhibits the qualities of an invalidating environment, wherein responses to a person’s emotional experiences are often inappropriate or inconsistent. In such settings the communication of emotional distress is generally ignored or responded to negatively with increasingly harsh responses that fail to address the cause of the distress. An invalidating environment promotes emotional and behavioural dysregulation, which is consistent with the experiences of many people held in immigration detention. Work by mental health professionals provides an important framework for understanding the corrosive nature of immigration detention and suggests a range of clinical approaches that may be adapted to assist detainees in developing resilience to such settings. Read paper: https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/challenges-to-providing-mental-health-care-in-immigration-detention-global-detention-project-working-paper-no-19


Naujoks, Daniel. 2016. Migration, Human Mobility and Sustainable Development, MUNPlanet - World Politics series, https://www.munplanet.com/articles/fridays-with-munplanet/migration-human-mobility-and-sustainable-development

The piece unpacks the four principal ways in which refugees, IDPs, immigration and emigration interact with sustainable development, namely, through (1) the level of development that can influence the mobility of people, (2) mobility leading to substantial development gains for the people who move, (3) migrants and refugees as agents of development who actively contribute to development in their countries of origin and destination and (4) migrants, refugees and displaced persons as vulnerable groups whose specific needs can be targeted by sustainable development efforts. The essay explores the importance of the Sustainable Development Goals for human mobility. It concludes by reiterating that it’s time for the world to come together to make human mobility easier, cheaper, and safer. This will benefit us all.


Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration (edited by Nauja Kleist and Dorte Thorsen; published by Routledge)

This volume takes departure in a mobility paradox that characterizes contemporary migration. Whereas people all over the world are exposed to widening sets of meaning of the good life elsewhere, an increasing number of people in the Global South have little or no access to international legal migration circuits. The book examines how African migrants respond to this situation. Focusing on hope, it explores migrants’ temporal and spatial horizons of expectation and possibility and how these horizons link to mobility practices. Such analysis is pertinent as precarious life conditions and increasingly restrictive regimes of mobility characterize the lives of many Africans, while migration continues to constitute important livelihood strategies and to be seen as pathways of improvement. Whereas involuntary immobility is one consequence, another is the emergence and consolidation of new destinations emerging in the Global South. It examines this development through empirically grounded and theoretically rich case studies in migrants’ countries of origin, zones of transit, and in new and established destinations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Latin America and China. It thereby offers an original perspective on linkages between migration, hope, and immobility, ranging from migration aspirations to return.

In addition to the introduction, the book contains nine case studies, written by Heike Drotbohm, Ida Vammen, Jesper Bjarnesen, Stephen Lubkemann, Heidi Østbø Haugen, Maria Hernandez-Carretero, Sylvie Bredeloup, Hans Lucht and Nauja Kleist.  More info in the attached flyer or here https://www.routledge.com/Hope-and-Uncertainty-in-Contemporary-African-Migration/Kleist-Thorsen/p/book/9781138961210 .

Should you be interested in reviewing the book, please contact Giana Georgi, Marketing Assistant, [log in to unmask] or Nauja Kleist, PhD, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies, [log in to unmask] 


Accessing ‘Home’: Refugee Returns to Towns and Cities

CWS is pleased to share its latest report on urbanization and forced displacement, Accessing ‘Home’: Refugee Returns to Towns and Cities. This project was undertaken with support from PRM, and draws on interviews and household surveys with urban returnees in Côte d'Ivoire and Rwanda, with the goal of identifying links between urbanization and return dynamics in town and small city contexts. The data collected indicates that urbanization is occurring from the point of flight into country of asylum and secondary displacement in exile, through to returns to country of origin and post-return internal migration. Given this reality, it is increasingly necessary for voluntary repatriation policy and operations to reflect dynamics in urban and non-camp settings. CWS offers recommendations for putting this into practice, including indicators that could be used urban returns monitoring, based on findings from the study.

We invite you to download the full report: http://cwsglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/urban-refugees-full-report.pdf  or executive summary: http://cwsglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ExecSum-CWS-Report_Jan2017.pdf . A French-language summary, with focus on findings from Côte d'Ivoire, is also available: http://cwsglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Urban-returns_CDI-French_Jan2017.pdf . Feedback is welcome and can be shared via e-mail to: [log in to unmask]

Erol Kekic
Executive Director
CWS Immigration and Refugee Program

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