Thoughout the world the number of refugees and asylum seekers continues to increase at an astonishing rate. Given that most will have left their country due to persecution, war, or appalling violations of their human rights, many will have specific mental health needs. Cultural and socioeconomic factors play a major role in expressions of distress, help seeking, pathways into care, and acceptance or rejection of treatments. Being a refugee or asylum seeker raises questions about an individual's self respect and altered identity. Too often though, the needs of this population are ignored by policy makers and clinicians, and these people are left to fend for themselves.
Mental Health of Refugees and Asylum Seekers presents both the theoretical and practical aspects of the mental health needs of refugees and asylum seekers. It looks at the impact of migration on mental health and adjustment, collective trauma, individual identity, and diagnostic fallacies. A practical section highlights cultural factors, ethnopsychopharmacology, therapeutic interaction, therapeutic expectation and psychotherapy. The final part of the book focuses on special problems - such as bereavement, sexual violence, and post traumatic stress disorders, as well as considering mental health problems in special groups, such as child refugees.
This book will be an essential resource for all mental health professionals- helping them better understand the needs of refugees and asylum seekers, how their problems can be managed, and how they can best be helped.

Prevention of mental illness and mental health promotion have often been ignored in the past, both in undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. Recently, however, there has been a clear shift towards public mental health, as a result of increasing scientific evidence that both these actions have a serious potential to reduce the onset of illness and subsequent burden as a result of mental illness and related social, economic and political costs. A clear distinction between prevention of mental illness and mental health promotion is critical. Selective prevention, both at societal and individual level, is an important way forward. The Oxford Textbook of Public Mental Health brings together the increasing interest in public mental health and the growing emphasis on the prevention of mental ill health and promotion of well-being into a single comprehensive textbook. Comprising international experiences of mental health promotion and mental well-being, chapters are supplemented with practical examples and illustrations to provide the most relevant information succinctly. This book will serve as an essential resource for mental and public health professionals, as well as for commissioners of services, nurses and community health visitors.

It is not enough for mental health professionals to make best use of the evidence base; they must also ensure that interventions are culturally appropriate, acceptable and ethical. This is a very complex task - to work with culturally diverse populations who may not expect the same sort of treatments or interventions or even assessment processes as the cultural majority. How can professionals work confidently with people from diverse cultural backgrounds, engage with the emotional and professional demands, and be more creative about how to improve the quality of care and the take up of care? This short volume, developed by service users, practitioners, teachers and researchers, aims to address this issue. Each chapter is a concise, thought-provoking, engaging and creative essay about a clinical scenario that is central to improving the quality of care to culturally diverse populations. The scenarios are common, and the essays set out beautifully some of the obstacles to improving care, dilemmas facing the clinician, and how they might be overcome.

Cultural psychiatry deals with the impact of culture on causation, perpetuation and treatment of patients suffering with mental illness. The role of culture in mental illness is increasingly being recognised, and the misconceptions that can occur as a result of cultural differences can lead to misdiagnoses, under or over-diagnosis. This second edition of the Textbook of Cultural Psychiatry has been completely updated with additional new chapters on globalisation and mental health, social media and tele-psychiatry. Written by world-leading experts in the field, this new edition provides a framework for the provision of mental health care in an increasingly globalised world. The first edition of the Textbook of Cultural Psychiatry was commended in the BMA Book Awards in 2008 and was the recipient of the 2012 Creative Scholarship Award from the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture.

`The book will be of interest, and easily read by anyone working with a multi-ethnic clientele and should be required reading for anyone in the field of mental health' -Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry `I recommend this book as an important addition to the literature on mental health and on racism...this is a book well worth readying and studying.' - Transcultural Psychiatry Sept 2005 `Kam Bhui makes a valuable and important contribution to our understanding of culture and ethnicity. I strongly advise all psychiatrists, both consultants and trainees, to read this book and to respond honestly to the challenges it presents. It demonstrates the value of political and social analyses of our work in the training of psychiatrists. But for me, its greatest value is in the way it shows how we must acknowledge the influence of our own histories and cultural backgrounds on the way we approach our work and those we struggle to help. The Other will cease to be an Other only when we accept the Other in ourselves.' -British Journal of Psychiatry `This is a refreshing addition to the growing body of literature on racism and mental health. Bhui draws together personal and professional experiences with current research evidence to provide a cogent analysis of the relationship between racism and mental health from both theoretical and experiential perspectives. The particular strength of this model is that it is anchored in the lived experiences of black service users...[It] should be a call to action for all mental health practitioners.' -Mental Health today `The book provides an excellent illustration of the extent of institutional racism, not just in mental health, but within the NHS as a whole and should be widely used particularly in education institutions and medical schools.' - community practitioner This thought-provoking book investigates the impact of racism (both conscious and unconscious) in mental health settings, covering individual clinical encounters and the broader picture of service provision. The authors offer insights into manifestations of racism in contemporary Britain; racial and cultural identity and the significance of these in psychotherapy; and the inequalities in provision of mental health services to minority ethnic communities. They consider the problems of racism and mental health, not in isolation but in the larger context of cultural difference and social inequalities, and also on the level of human relationships. Bringing together the experiences of mental health professionals and incorporating a service user's perspective, this book provides many practical strategies for addressing racism and dealing with its effects in psychiatric work, and will prove useful and informative to practitioners in many areas of mental health work.