How to Deal with Growing Racism and Discrimination against Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Europe?

Abstract

The growing number of refugees and asylum seekers pouring in Europe due to wars and armed conflicts constitute a great challenge for psychiatry and the mental health field. This challenge also includes the growing racism and discrimination against refugees and asylum seekers. Discrimination could be defined as the attitudes and behavior based on the group differences. Any group acknowledged and proclaimed as ‘the other’ by prevailing zeitgeist and dominant social powers, and further dehumanized may become the subject of discrimination. In a spectrum from dislike and micro-aggression to overt violence towards the other, it exists almost in all societies in varying degrees and forms; all forms involving some practices of exclusion and rejection. Hence, almost all the same specific human physical and psychosocial characteristics that constitute the bases for in-group identities and reference systems could also become the foundations of discrimination towards the humans identified as out-groups. Added to this, othering, rising from imagined and generalized differences and used to distinguish groups of people as separate from the norm reinforces and maintains discrimination.

Albeit the widespread exercise of discrimination against refugees and asylum seekers, peoples and mental health professionals also have a long history of aiming and practicing more inclusive ways of solving conflicts of interests between in-groups and out-groups. This presentation will mainly focus on the psychosocial aspects of the anti-discriminative efforts and search an agenda for the European Psychiatry in this regard.

Disclosure of interest

The author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.