The biomedical approach to refugee mental health, with its focus on the refugee as actual or potential victim of pathology, is increasingly being contested. In an era when refugees are either spoken about or spoken for, the medical discourse is seen as being complicit in configuring the refugee as 'other'. In response, literature has emerged that focuses on the 'social suffering' of refugees, paying heed to the displaced person as a textured human being whose emotional pain is made sense of in the context of collective and individual relationships and biographies. Through this study, we contribute to the field by exploring the narratives of 20 Bosnian refugees living in Western Australia. We focus on their descriptions of distress, emerging from experiences of exile. The narratives depict suffering not as a discrete pathological entity, but rather as an experience of radical discordance. We suggest that these narratives provide an alternative voice, which challenges the configurations of refugee, time and place existing in nationalist and medical discourses. Furthermore, we argue that through narrative, the refugees in this study have been able to actively contest prevailing discourses by repositioning themselves as agents and the supposedly benevolent receiving society as the source of suffering. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Bosnians Australia Narratives Mental health Refugees qualitative

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