Opinion
July 09 2010
Our barbed borders
Extending the halt on asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and
Afghanistan would have caused depression, panic and anxiety, writes
Professor Nicholas Procter.
Prime
Minister Julia Gillard faces critical decisions regarding the management of
asylum seekers to this country. The first is whether or not to extend or
lift the pause on processing asylum seeker applications from Sri Lanka and
Afghanistan.
My view is that the pause should be lifted. Simply put an extension of the pause will likely lead to an increase in behavioural disturbance, depression, post traumatic panic and anxiety for people now held in immigration detention. There is also good evidence to suggest that the longer people are held in detention they will be less likely to trust others and the more likely they are to suffer mental and physical deterioration.
The distress of living in limbo can manifest in feelings of fear, anxiety, sleep disturbance, and self-harm, as well as profound hopelessness, irritability and frustration. The overcrowded and meaningless conditions of detention and inability to communicate freely and spontaneously in a language most familiar to the detainees, will further compound and contribute to the mental health difficulties they experience.
Overcrowding within immigration detention is a major concern and is causally related to mental ill health through factors such as tense patterns of interaction and an inability to buffer stressful events or uncomfortable physical factors such as heat. Long waiting times for use of telephone, recreational and washing facilities add additional layers of frustration in an already stressed environment.
Overcrowding is also associated within an increased number of sound exposures both day and night and across nights in particular. This contributes to the adoption of inverted sleep patterns, with detainees sleeping during the day and as a consequence has a knock-on effect where they miss meals, social interaction, group activities and access to morning legal and/or medical appointments. The frequency of waking increases with the number and level of noise stimuli in the night. Sleep disturbance leads to chronic physiological change, compounding their anxiety and depression.
The cumulative mental health effect of sleep disturbance is associated with people being unable to cope with every day stress, unable to effectively problem solve and may contribute to physical health complaints.
Processing refugees quickly is vital in ensuring that as a nation, we do no further harm to people who have already suffered.
In making decisions on how to move forward on this important issue, the Prime Minister should be mindful that indefinite or lengthy forms of detention are clearly destructive to mental health. There needs to be informed leadership on the treatment of asylum seekers – and the detention process must again be scrutinised.
At the same time no compassionate answers can be found in policies of the alternative government.
The recent announcement by the Federal Opposition of their intention to re-introduce Temporary Protection Visas (TPV) should they win government is nothing short of cruel and reckless.
If the policy is reintroduced it will go a long way to ensuring traumatised people of refugee background almost never recover or have an opportunity to re-build their lives.
What causes me the greatest concern is the fact that it is now well known and documented that these policies caused great suffering, re-traumatisation and family dislocation for people who had already experienced suffering most of us can’t imagine. To consciously and deliberately reintroduce such a policy would be state-sanctioned cruelty.
To palm this off as a deterrent and therefore justifiable is not only morally bankrupt it shows a lack of intelligent leadership and humanity.
Fear, uncertainty and a legal impediment to getting on with life are a toxic stew that impact upon a persons’ ability to re-build their life. The TPV damages people who have already arrived – it is not something that operates to deter desperate people to hope for the chance of a better life by seeking asylum.
I have spent many hours with people of refugee background who were kept on a TPV and what they experienced was an inability to see a future for themselves, a sense of abiding depression and sadness including suicidal ideation, fear that they might be returned at any time, fear that their personal information would always be kept by authorities and used to prejudice against them here in Australia and a reluctance to engage with their world or seek help.
The temporal nature of their circumstances is an added trauma for people who generally have fled their homeland in dire circumstances - people who have seen death, torture and persecution in very personal ways.
Most people of refugee background want more than anything else to start afresh, to make a valuable contribution to a new life. Asylum seekers are no different. They also have a strong ambition to contribute to this country because they have a strong sense of what Australia represents.
For refugees the reintroduction of the TPV is a kind of time torture sentencing them to months and years of living on a knife’s edge.
Ironically, it runs counter to values such as individualism, independence, self reliance, and tolerance supposedly at the heart of the Liberal Conservative philosophy. Considering the facts – that most people who suffered under the TPV system were eventually made permanent residents in Australia - surely the Federal Opposition can think of more constructive ways to nurture them along the path to citizenship.
Freedom, stability and sense of belonging in a permanent home have a strong role to play in the psychological healing process for people of refugee background and are core to civil societies.
They are the combined antidote to factors such as post traumatic stress, depression and worry and fears of persecution, imprisonment, torture or even death and the chaos and disorder these stressors engender.
Permanent protection is the key to helping people to succeed. By providing stability, acceptance and understanding, refugees will then have the opportunity to prove themselves through work, education and community involvement, escape the stigma associated with their arrival here, and go on to live fruitful lives.
Professor Nicholas Procter is UniSA’s Chair: Mental Health Nursing. He has been working with people within or released from Australian Immigration Detention Centres since 1999.
An edited version of this article was published in the Independent Weekly newspaper on July 9th, 2010