Memory and resettlement: Somali women in Melbourne and emotional wellbeing

© 2003 Dr. Celia McMichaelThis thesis derives from ethnographic research that explored the lives of forty-two Somali women who migrated to Australia as a result of the Somali civil war. In particular, it explores Somali women's experiences of depression and emotional well-being. Studies of refugee mental health are frequently premised on an audible discourse that construes refugees as suffering predominantly from war, persecution and trauma. Further, the mental health ‘problems’ of refugees are firmly situated within the bodies and minds of those classified as refugees. The experiences documented in this thesis have a different focus, reflecting the ways in which Somali women's narratives encompassed their histories, changing social relations, and idioms of home and exile. Their accounts of depression lay partly within the language and experience of war and persecution, but emotional distress was frequently attributed to contemporary realities of family separation, loss of community cohesion, marginalisation, isolation, and the hardships of resettlement. Accordingly, this thesis is not an ethnography of a fixed place or social and cultural life, but provides a longitudinal account of a refugee population in Australia. The underlying focus of the research has been 'refugee mental health', however, analysis of the research findings has involved engagement with broader theoretical areas of historical memory, identity, community, home and exile, and transnationalism. The chapters that follow give an account of the idioms through which Somali women situate and give meaning to depression. In so doing, this thesis frames refugee mental health within the broader processes and interconnections of histories, displacement and resettlement, as well as the socio-political context of war