Fran Gale

Seeking refuge, losing hope: parents and children in immigration detention

Objective: To record observations made by the authors on a series of visits between December 2001 and March 2002 to two of Australias immigration detention centers and to consider the mental health consequences of Australias policy of mandatory immigration detention of asylum seekers for families and children. Conclusions: Parents and children in immigration detention are often vulnerable to mental health problems before they reach Australia. Experiences in prolonged detention add to their burden of trauma, which has an impact not only on the individual adults and children, but on the family process itself. Immigration detention profoundly undermines the parental role, renders the parent impotent and leaves the child without protection or comfort in already unpredictable surroundings where basic needs for safe play and education are unmet. This potentially exposes the child to physical and emotional neglect in a degrading and hostile environment and puts children at high risk of the developmental psychopathology that follows exposure to violence and ongoing parental despair. Psychiatrists have a role in advocating for appropriate treatment of these traumatized and vulnerable parents and children.

Using an interrupted space to explore social resilience with marginalized young people

In this article we discuss the advantages of using an ‘interrupted space’ to explore understandings of Social Resilience with marginalized young people. In researching with communities of youth who live with multiple disadvantage and who may have little experience of social resilience we sought to create an ‘interrupted space’ in their daily lives in order to explore how they may construct or define social resilience given a different life world. Examples are given of how an interrupted space enabled insight into aspects of social resilience which may have remained hidden had there been no ‘circuit breaker’ in these young people’s lives enabling them to contribute. Where new opportunities were provided those who may have previously been excluded from dialogue were enabled to experience and contribute to an understanding of social resilience.

Time to Father

Abstract This paper reports the qualitative findings from 40 couples involved in a study exploring mens post-natal mental health. Interviews were conducted with individuals soon after the birth of their first child. Findings suggest that new fathers want to be more involved in the direct care and nurturing of their children than their fathers were with them. Discourses which construct fathers and inform social structures have not kept pace with mens changed attitudes and role expectations limiting the options available to men as fathers. In particular mens employment circumstances figure in their experience of adjusting to life as a father. Those fathers having least flexibility and autonomy in their work report experiencing, since the birth of their child, more unhappi-ness, anxiety, and generally higher levels of stress. These findings suggest increasing workplace flexibility and provisions such as parental leave are important for mens post-natal mental health.

Social resilience: challenging neo-colonial thinking and practices around ‘risk’

Understandings of resilience which primarily focus on the individual are of limited applicability unless we recognise the historical, economic and political factors in which social life occurs. To explore the social foundations of resilience is to chart the ongoing influence of these factors. An appreciation of this context is pivotal to any understanding of the current situation of Indigenous young Australians. Social and economic disadvantage which so profoundly affects Indigenous Australian populations is directly attributable to effects of colonial policy, institutionalised discrimination and contemporary racism. The neo-colonial continuation of such practices can be seen in the reproduction of Aboriginality as problematic, and Indigenous people as at high risk and requiring intensive intervention and governance. The social determinants of resilience are thereby obscured by a focus on particular individual risk factors. Understanding and acknowledging social resilience acts as a counterforce to this approach. This study discusses the themes central to social resilience that are highlighted by a group of Australian Indigenous young men, which challenge or subvert the notion of Aboriginality as problematic. The innovative processes that these Australian Indigenous young men have set in train overturn traditional thinking and practice about ‘risk’.

Social resilience: Transformation in two Australian communities facing chronic adversity

Resilience has predominantly been investigated as an individual’s response to adversity and, at the level of the collective, how communities respond to a direct threat. The social work literature investigating social resilience as a response to the challenge of subtle, pervasive and divisive social threats is limited. This article presents the findings of research conducted in two Australian communities with young people who experienced marginalisation; it investigated how sustained social resilience could be evoked in response to the disadvantage they experienced. Six themes that reflect the expression of social resilience emerged from the data and provide insights for social workers practising with communities facing chronic adversity.