Madam, – In his excellent recent reporting on the asylum system in Ireland, Jamie Smyth alluded to the mental health toll of spending years “in limbo” in the system.
There is indeed a large body of evidence that supports what may seem obvious: the asylum process, with its crushing daily degradations, damages mental health.
Refugees are at higher risk of serious mental illness than native populations, and asylum-seekers are at higher risk again. Figures for suicide are unknown because of inadequate data collection. However, data from the UK indicate that the prevalence of self-harm and suicide among detained asylum-seekers is remarkably high.
The existing asylum process is inherently harmful to a group of people already damaged by pre-migration traumas such as armed conflict, rape, or torture. It may be that the people most likely to be rejected for refugee status are those who suffer most before migrating: the experiences that forced them from their homes are often cognitively damaging, result in fragmented or inconsistent memories of the kind that can be regarded as evidence of fabrication.
This is not to diminish in any way the incredibly tough and often heart-rending work of individual asylum officials.
It is simply to note that an asylum system that hurts people who have already been through experiences so horrific that we can barely conceive of them is one that is beneath us as a society. It is an asylum system in need of urgent reform. – Yours, etc,