PhD Graduate Marie-Pier Joly and Professor Blair Wheaton published an article in Society and Mental Health. The article assesses the impact of armed conflict in country of origin on mental health in migrants to Canada. Joly and Wheaton examine variation in stress to understand differences in mental health between those who experienced conflict and those who did not, as well as between men and women within each category.
Marie-Pier Joly obtained her PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto in 2017. She is a postdoctoral researcher at Göttingen University studying the experiences of migrants from Muslim-majority countries. Blair Wheaton is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and his current research examines the role of neighbourhood effects on mental health outcomes.
We have posted the citation and the abstract of the article below. The full text is available through the University of Toronto Library Portal here.
Joly, Marie-Pier and Blair Wheaton. 2014. "The Impact of Armed Conflict in the Country of Origin on Mental Health after Migration to Canada." Society and Mental Health, 5(2):86-105.
This article examines mental health differences among migrants who emigrated from both armed conflict countries and non–conflict countries versus native-born Canadians. We propose that the impact of armed conflict on mental health depends on defining characteristics of the conflict. Our analysis of migrants to Toronto, Canada, suggests that exposure to major intrastate conflicts have long-term impacts on depression among women and anxiety levels among men after migration. We assess the role of different stages and types of stress proliferation in explaining these differences. Postmigratory chronic stress helps explain differences in depression between migrant women who experienced conflict and both those who did not and Canadian-born women. Conversely, traumatic stress that occurred during the ongoing armed conflict at time of migration helped explain differences in anxiety between migrant men exposed to conflict and both migrant men not exposed and Canadian-born men.
Read the full article here.