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Migration and mental health in Canada: can government policy help?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Stephen Kisely
Stephen Kisely*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada, email Stephen.Kisely@cdha.nshealth.ca
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Canada admits more than 220 000 immigrants every year and this is reflected in the statistic that 18% of the population was born abroad (Beiser, 2005). However, government policy emphasises the admission of healthy immigrants rather than their subsequent health. Immigrants do not show a consistently elevated rate of psychiatric illness, and morbidity is related to an interaction between predisposition and socio-environmental factors, rather than immigration per se. These factors include forced migration and circumstances after arrival, such as poverty, limited recognition of qualifications, discrimination and isolation from the immigrant's own community. For instance, in Canada more than 30% of immigrant families live below the official poverty line in the first 10 years of settlement (Beiser, 2005).

Type
Thematic Paper - Migration and Psychiatric Adjustment
Information
International Psychiatry , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , July 2008 , pp. 57 - 59
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 2008

References

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