2025/06/21 by Naidu, Jessica, Chowdhury, Nashit, Oddone Paolucci, Elizabeth +3
#Community Engagement #Ethnic Minority #Immigrant #Inclusive #Newcomer #Participatory #Power Informed #Racialized #Transdisciplinary #Visible Minority
paper · doi:10.11575/prism/49514
Objective: The objective of this review is to systematically examine and analyze the literature on the impact of racism on the mental health and wellness of refugees. Research Question: What is the impact of racism on the mental health and wellness of refugees? Introduction: The Mental Health Commission of Canada states that we have a responsibility to foster incoming refugees’ mental health and wellness. Media portrayals of refugees have constructed them as hidden terrorists, bogus claimants, and vectors of disease/risk. Research shows that racism harms health, hence the constructs above may harm refugee health and wellness. For this review, the population is resettled refugees of all ages. The outcomes are mental health and wellness, and psychosocial well-being among refugees. Methods: We searched for published academic literature using MEDLINE (Ovid), PsycINFO, CINAHL, Evidence-Based Medicine Reviews, PubMed, Embase, and SocIndex and used Google Scholar, Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) https://cmha.ca/, The Canadian Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) http://www.camh.ca/, Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC) https://www.mentalhealthcommission.ca/English, Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/193.html, Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health.html, National Institutes of Health (NIH) https://www.nih.gov/, and OAISTER (WorldCat) https://oaister.worldcat.org/ to look for published grey literature. Findings: Our search yielded 3,116 citations. We had 2,532 articles after removing duplicates and 2,448 articles ater title and abstract screening, leaving 84 for full-text review. Sixteen (80%) of the twenty articles found racism to be associated to poor mental health and psychosocial outcomes. Four (20%) of the articles did not find an association between racism and mental health. Conclusion: This review found several articles that focused on racism in the media and its impact on refugee mental health. This finding emphasizes the importance of focusing on media-based racism and its impact on refugee mental health and wellness.