immigration | kidsaregifts

Some people live their entire lives within a circle of 1 kilometre radius – born at the local hospital, went to the local primary and then secondary school, met their spouse at the local pub, worked at a local office or business and buried in the local cemetery. I met a lot of people like that in Northern Ireland and their level of contentment never ceased to amaze me.

At present, many countries are in a state of utter chaos. Multitudes of people are leaving their homes and countries to be somewhere better and safer even if it costs them their lives. Some venture out with their children. They step into the unknown with hardly any belongings or certainty. I wonder how desperate one has to be to do that!

One of the social factors well known to predispose individuals to psychosis is migration. There are 3 main reasons for it:

Family break-up
Adjust to living in large urban areas
Social inequalities in the new country

A Dutch study has shown that the risk of psychotic disorders is higher for non-Western immigrants to the Netherlands than for Dutch citizens. The risk of psychotic disorders in the Hague was highest among those who migrated between ages 0 and 4, but in those who migrated after age 29 the risk was no higher than that for Dutch citizens. Ethnic minority-related environmental exposures such as social disadvantage, exclusion and adversity after migration may explain the higher risk of psychotic disorder among younger migrants.

More than 2000 people have already died this year while attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Many more are missing or in camps. The refugee numbers in the Middle East run into millions of which thousands are children. Not only is the present state of affairs lamentable, it does not bode well for their mental well-being.

Fishermen in the Mediterranean have been catching human corpses on a regular basis lately. Every morning on the news I hear about migrants desperate to leave their own homes and countries to find better lives elsewhere, often risking everything they have including their lives. They claim to be doing so in order to escape torture, extreme poverty, rape and other forms of violence.

At present we, the human race, can boast of the largest human migrations ever in the history of human kind – 60 million people. The population of UK is 64 million. 3500 people died last year crossing the Med while 13,500 were rescued. This year more than 1600 people have already lost their lives in this way.

I am a migrant. I came to the UK to work and be better at my job. I had contract in hand. I was to go to a place called Antrim. I had never heard of it before. I had no family or friends there. It was a beautiful place but I was all alone for 9 months. I arranged a rented house, a car and a child minder before my son came to join me. It was a difficult time. Communication technology was not great at that time. Phone calls were prohibitively expensive. No mobile phones, Skype or WhatsApp existed. Just the good old postal service and very brief phone calls. It was a desperately isolating experience despite the fact that I was warm, safe, fed and watered.

When I hear the stories of migrants making unbelievable journeys across the seas with nearly no money, nowhere to go, horrific experiences from their past and complete uncertainty of the future, I can’t imagine how frazzled their state of mind must be.

How come millions of people are not able to live in their own homes and countries? What becomes of them?

How did we come to this?