Resilience, mental health, and migration

Abstract This chapter will explore mental health and resilience in the context of migration. The notion of resilience has received increasing attention recently as a way of making sense of how people cope with adverse events and hardship, and as a possible protective variable that makes mental health difficulties less likely. At a time when health care providers and policymakers are attempting to come to terms with the high levels of inter- and intranational movement of people in the early twenty-first century, it is appropriate to consider what resilience offers as a way of making sense of the psychological and psychiatric issues raised by migration and what it means for health care providers and migrants themselves. This chapter will therefore review the literature that has addressed resilience and migration, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries. We describe the life experiences and resilience of internal migrant communities in low-income neighbourhoods in India, and the insights on resilience and migration in responding to the mental health needs of individuals and families who have migrated. In addition to different ‘idioms of distress’ it is proposed that it is important to be attentive to the different ‘eudaemonic idioms’ through which different cultural groups express the factors that are significant to them in maintaining happiness and promoting coping.