A survey has found the lack of control over their lives has left asylum seekers with poor mental health. Southern Correspondent Barry Roche reports
Almost half of immigrants to Cork and Kerry show poor mental wellbeing while there are also indications of significant mental health problems among immigrants, according to a health needs survey.
The data was presented at a recent conference on services for asylum seekers in Cork.
Specialist registrar in public health medicine in the HSE Mid-Western Area, Dr Anne Sheehan, told the conference: "A major issue for asylum seekers was 'control' over their lives. Most find it difficult to go from leading an active productive life to one of waiting and inactivity."
Dr Sheehan, who conducted her research on immigrants from 35 countries in Cork and Kerry, said some 48 per cent of the study group were found to have poor mental wellbeing.
She said she found asylum seekers expressed dissatisfaction with aspects of the "direct provision system" including a sense of isolation from the general Irish population compounded by the isolated location of some centres.
The direct provision system was also criticised by several others who addressed the conference organised by the HSE Southern Area and the Department of Applied Social Studies at UCC.
Irish Refugee Council chief executive, Peter O'Mahony, said that people who had sought asylum in Ireland faced huge barriers to integration dating back to their time in the asylum process here and added, "direct provision contributes to enforced passivity".
"The necessity to provide for clothes, toiletries and travel costs out of a small weekly allowance - €19.10 for adults and €9.60 for dependants under 18 - prevents asylum seekers from accessing many of the social facilities like cafes and cinemas that characterise Irish society," he added.
O'Mahony said that many asylum seekers had left countries where they would have had extensive community or family support, and they found difficulty duplicating such support networks with people from other cultures with whom they may have very little in common.
He cited the views of Dr Pat Bracken, a consultant psychiatrist at Bantry General Hospital, who has argued that direct provision could, in some ways, do as much long-term damage to asylum seekers' mental health as the trauma from which they fled.
"Dr Bracken believes the powerlessness experienced by those in direct provision gives rise in many cases to a depression more insidious than the initial trauma. Such mental health problems can only further impede asylum seekers' chances of fully integrating into Irish society."
Zimbabwean refugee Nogugu Mafu from Killarney said the experience of being an asylum seeker and not allowed work was very demeaning with people being labelled as "spongers and freeloaders".
"And keeping people in hostels is depressing - the segregation, the institutionalisation and the isolation is robbing people of their dignity, their status and their pride as human beings," said Mafu, a trained secondary teacher from Bulawayo in Matebeland in Southern Zimbabwe.
Mafu came to Ireland in February 2002 with her then six-year-old son, Methembe, following the kidnapping and suspected murder of her husband, a political activist with the Movement For Democratic Change in Zimbabwe.
"One thing I would like to see happen is that staff in hostels would be trained in multicultural issues. Very often, they can vary from being downright rude to condescending and patronizing,. she said.
" They should realise that it's not by choice people find themselves in these situations."
Psychologist and chairwoman of Immigrant Voice, Alvina Grosu, who has been twice refused refugee status in Ireland, described the process of seeking asylum here as "one of the most difficult experiences" of her life.
"There were no choices in direct provision, all the decisions were made by the manager and owner of the hotel - what you ate, what time you go to bed, if you are allowed visitors," she said, adding that it meant "people in the asylum system have no sense of future."
"You are only sure of things that already happened today, what is going to happen tomorrow is known only by officials from the Department of Justice.
"You can't even plan the immediate future because you have no control over your life and no resources," she said.