Overview

Edited by:

Nicholas Procter

Professor and Chair: Mental Health Nursing, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA

Monica McEvoy

Nurse Practitioner, Multicultural Mental Health, Child Adolescent Mental Health Services, Adelaide, SA

Irena Papadopoulos

Professor and Head, Research Centre for Transcultural Studies in Health, Middlesex University, UK

The reality is that the global economic crisis has resulted in an emphasis on reduction in health care spending and in mental health, a focus on the reduction of hospitalisation for those with high-cost, low prevalence disorders such as schizophrenia. 'Early intervention' has been re-badged in difficult economic times as the identification of early symptoms or risk factors for serious mental illness. The responsibility for addressing the broader social determinants of mental health and illness is wrestled away from mental health services and placed with services that were established largely to provide general welfare services.

At the heart of all of this change are the needs of those with the least opportunity to voice concerns. Children and young people who come from other lands as forced or unforced migrants not only have to deal with their own experience of trauma both pre and post settlement in the host country, they often also have parents who have their own trauma histories, which have the potential to negatively impact on their parenting. We also know that these young people and their parents are less likely to access mainstream mental health services. Therefore this requires services to be more flexible in their service delivery, engage with newly arrived communities and spend time explicating the alternative explanatory models. It also requires mainstream mental health services to work in true partnerships with other health, welfare, education and housing services to address the real need as expressed by people who come to another country as migrants.

The next question is what does all this mean for a people in a world that is ever changing? This Special Issue of Advances in Mental Health provides an opportunity to showcase recent practice from around the world, adding to the debate about best practice in transcultural mental health service provision.

The papers contained within this Special Issue advocate both increased cultural competence in mental health services, as well as challenge service providers to move beyond individual clinical practice and explore their responsibility in addressing the broader socio-political issues that underlie many of the mental health problems experienced by migrants.

Migration and Mental Health aims to engage readers in new ways of thinking and doing, whether that is in clinical practice, policy, academia or as service users.

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