Five-year prevalence and determinants of mental illness in recently resettled refugee populations

Data research to improve refugee health. This program of work will examine multiple annual waves from the ‘Building a New Life in Australia’ survey; a unique source of information collected in a longitudinal, nationally representative cohort study involving 2,399 recently resettled humanitarian migrants. The 3-year findings showed a high prevalence of mental illness among our national representative cohort that persisted over the first three years of resettlement. At baseline, 30.3% (95%CI 28.5-32.2) had PTSD and 15.4% (95%CI 14.0-16.9) had severe mental illness. This project will extend the work done by a previous BMedSc student published at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00545/abstract The results raise multiple future avenues for research, both with the BNLA cohort and for new studies of refugees. Analysis of the remaining BNLA study waves, when available, are likely to provide a richer understanding of the first 5+ years of refugee resettlement in Australia. Using the already available BNLA data, future research should consider a deeper sub-group analysis by migration pathway and region of birth. This would allow researchers to examine the different meanings of concepts such as social support among the diverse BNLA subgroups. New studies examining like-ethnic social support in an Australian context are also warranted, with a focus on the link between perceived discrimination, mental health and ethnic identity. Qualitative research would give further insight into the meaning of like-ethnic support in the Australian context and how this changes between different ethnic groups. A matched comparison with the wider Australian population from national mental health survey data could be done. Researchers could match BNLA participants with individuals from the wider Australian population by age, gender and SEIFA decile of disadvantage. They could then conduct conditional Poisson regression risk ratios to directly ascertain differences in risk, controlling for socio-demographic factors.