Doctors: Processing of Australian asylum seekers worsens mental health
Updated
Christmas Islands is one of the places where Australia kept asylum seekers.
A team of Australian psychiatrists has identified what they believe is a new mental health condition in asylum seekers.
The researchers say they're seeing a unique combination of depression, psychoses and anxiety in asylum seekers, and say the cause has less to do with the trauma of fleeing from a home country and more to do with the lengthy process of obtaining asylum in Australia.
Psychiatrist Dr Suresh Sundram, from Melbourne University, told Radio Australia's Sephanie March he has found many asylum seekers are suffering from a new form of mental illness.
"We've found a set of symptoms that seem to be unique to the population of asylum seekers in Australia who've been in the system for a protracted period of time. The symptoms are depressive in nature but they also incluse post traumatic symptoms and anxiety symptoms."
Diagnoses of depression and post-traumatic stress are not new amongst asylum seekers, but Dr Sundram says it's the way the symptoms form together in individuals that's unique.
"The people that we are seeing seem to have a lot of the symptoms of these disorders but they seem to have a new way these symptoms aggregate in them and they also seem to have additional symptoms, such as the way they think seems to be different, their ability to focus on the rest of their life seem significantly impaired."
While some would-be refugees develop mental health issues as a result of traumas in their home countries, Dr Sundram says that in the patients he's seeing, the experience of trying to get asylum here is also to blame.
"We think that it's this process of seeking asylum for a very long time that causes that causes this particular constellation of symptoms among people seeking asylum here."
Caz Coleman, from the Hotham Mission Asylum Seeker Project in the southern state of Victoria, says while there are services provided for new arrivals seeking asylum in Australia, those who've had their application turned down and are on a waiting list for special ministerial consideration get no help at all.
"About 50 per cent of our clients have been in this process for more than 5 years and our longest client at the moment would be 12 years."
She says many of her clients have become visibly depressed and anxious during the long wait to get on with their lives.
"Significantly what we see is people who are left destitute in the community for long periods of time and when you are not able to feed or house yourself or your children, that situation has consequences that I think often lead to mental health probs where people are just struggeling enormously not only with the process of protection, but the destitution they are put in as a result of the current policy."
Psychiatrist Fiona Hawker worked with many asylum seekers at the now closed Baxter Detention Centre in South Australia.
She says she also saw unprecedented clusters of mental illness symptoms among detainees.
"The ones that presented for in-patient care were all severely disabled with mental health problems and what was extraordinary was the uniformity of their clinical presenting picture, with major depression, usually with psychotic features usually with post traumatic stress disorder."
She supports Dr Sundram's findings, regarding the link between mental health and lengthy visa application processes.
"A lot of them felt very cheated, overwhelmed and most of these people had been seeking asylum repeatedly for many years one way or another and so the sense of hopelessness, the sense of powerlessness and total demoralisation."
Having identified an unprecedented problem, Dr Suresh Sundram says what's needed to help asylum seekers cope better, doesn't necessarily involve medication:
"I think the way to deal with in a socially responsible way would be to provide access to health care, to provide people with work and study rights, and to provide an expedited humanitarian process of granting protection to cases deemed worthy of that. "
