“I FEEL I AM A BIRD WITHOUT WINGS”: DISCOURSES OF SADNESS AND LOSS AMONG EAST AFRICANS IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Abstract

Using data from a qualitative study of understandings and experiences of “depression” among a number of East African communities in Western Australia, this article explores the dimensions of sadness and loss expressed by migrants and refugees. After discussing the parameters and cross-cultural (ir)relevance of the Western biomedical notion of “depression” (Kleinman and Good 1985) and its relationship to the hegemony of the Western “happiness” imperative (Wierzbicka 1999: 249), the article discusses methodological challenges involved in exploring understandings of “depression” among migrants. It then examines the ways in which sadness is expressed and the causes to which it is attributed, using extracts from interviews and focus groups with over 100 people from Ethiopian, Eritrean, Sudanese, and Somali backgrounds. The article argues that individualizing these concerns and reading them within the dominant Western biomedical framework of “depression” reinforces pathological representations of migrants and refugees, ignores structural disadvantage that produces negative emotional responses, limits settlement service responses, and may be recruited for the negative end result of arguing against immigration.

Key Words:

• migration
• mental health
• depression
• refugees

The author is grateful to the participants in the research and to Healthway for funding the project.

Notes

1. Radden (in Levin 1987) traces the historical shift from melancholy as unreason, to melancholia as madness, to depression as psychiatric disorder open to medical treatment. Jackson (Kleinman and Good 1985) also notes that the concepts of melancholia and acedia were precursors to modern “depression.” These terms were imbued with meanings from Christianity and medicine, overlaying internal sorrow with a moral indictment of sloth. Melancholia was associated at different times with different explanatory idioms: the somatic; psychological; religious; or moral. In Ancient Greece melancholy was thought to be divine punishment for a misdeed. For Christians it was a test by the devil. Depression was not always stigmatised, however, for melancholics often thought of themselves as rather superior beings. In sixteenth-century England the melancholic was seen as witty, creative, and intellectual. Hamlet is a prime example. By the late seventeenth century, however, humoral explanations had already given way to chemical and mechanical ones (blood circulation), leaving open the way for modern biomedical definitions of biochemical imbalances in the brain and hormonal fluctuations (Wolpert 1999). The point of this brief summary is to illustrate the historical and cultural embeddedness of understandings of deep sadness.

2. The research collaboration by a team from Murdoch University and the East Perth Public Health Unit was funded by a Healthway grant. Chief investigators on the project were Ilse O'Ferral, Mark Rapley, Alan Peterson, and Renata Kokanovic. The author was Research Officer on the project.

3. It would be wrong to homogenise these very different populations and assume no religious, language, and tribal differences between them. However, for the sake of this article, their shared concerns are the focus.

4. Bilingual facilitators conducted focus groups in community languages using a semi-structured, standardised schedule. Recruiters were asked to ensure a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, and different migration histories were represented.

5. Recordings were transcribed verbatim and translated by the facilitators, who were accredited translators. All of the interviews, the youth focus groups, and focus groups with South Sudanese and Oromo men, and a mixed group of North Sudanese, were conducted in English by the author. Non-grammatical English evident in the transcript excerpts is both a function of verbatim transcription and translation by assistants from non-English speaking backgrounds. Some of the English has been tidied for clarity. Transcription conventions are as follows:

• … pause in talk

• [ ] section of transcript deleted

• [with text] words inserted by researcher to clarify meaning

6. By using membership categorisation analysis, a method used by ethnomethodologists to analyse how categories become relevant in language use, it could be argued that participants provided the relevant “category predicates” or discussed “category-bound activities,” for the categories that we, as researchers, had used to identify them (see Silverman 1994).

7. Centrelink is the name of the Australian government institution that provides welfare payments for unemployment, sickness, income support, etc.