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Refugee identity is often shrouded in suspicion, speculation and rumour. Of course everyone wants to protect “real” refugees, but it often seems – upon reading the papers – that the real challenge is to find them among the interlopers: the “bogus asylum seekers”, the “queue jumpers”, the “illegals”.

Yet these distinctions and definitions shatter the moment we subject them to critical scrutiny. In Syria, no one would deny a terrible refugee crisis is unfolding. Western journalists report from camps in Jordan and Turkey documenting human misery and occasionally commenting on political manoeuvring, but never doubting the refugees’ veracity.

But once these same Syrians leave the overcrowded camps to cross the Mediterranean, a spell transforms these objects of pity into objects of fear. They are no longer “refugees”, but “illegal migrants” and “terrorists”. However data on migrants rescued in the Mediterranean show that up to 80% of those intercepted by the Italian Navy are in fact deserving of asylum, not detention.

Other myths perpetuate suspicion and xenophobia. Every year in the UK, refugee charity and advocacy groups spend precious resources trying to counter tabloid images of a Britain “swamped” by itinerant swan-eaters and Islamic extremists. The truth – that Britain is home to just 1% of refugees while 86% are hosted in developing countries, including some of the poorest on earth, and that one-third of refugees in the UK hold University degrees – is simply less convenient for politicians pushing an anti-migration agenda.

We are increasingly skilled in crafting complacent fictions intended not so much to demonise refugees as exculpate our own consciences. In Australia, for instance, ever-more restrictive asylum policies – which have seen all those arriving by boat transferred off-shore and, even when granted refugee status, refused the right to settle in Australia – have been presented by supporters as merely intended to prevent the nefarious practice of “queue-jumping”. In this universe, the border patrols become the guardians ensuring “fair” asylum hearings, while asylum-seekers are condemned for cheating the system.

That the system itself now contravenes international law is forgotten. Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan asylum-seeking mothers recently placed on suicide watch – threatening to kill themselves in the hope that their orphaned, Australian-born children might then be saved from detention – are judged guilty of “moral blackmail”.

Such stories foster complacency by encouraging an extraordinary degree of confidence in our ability to sort the deserving from the undeserving. The public remain convinced that “real” refugees wait in camps far beyond Europe’s borders, and that they do not take their fate into their own hands but wait to be rescued. But this “truth” too is hypocritical. It conveniently obscures the fact that the West will not resettle one-tenth of the refugees who have been identified by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees as in need of resettlement.

In fact, only one refugee in a hundred will ever be resettled from a camp to a third country in the West. In January 2014 the UK Government announced it would offer 500 additional refugee resettlement places for the “most vulnerable” refugees as a humanitarian gesture: but it’s better understood as political rationing.

Research shows us that undue self-congratulation when it comes to “helping” refugees is no new habit. Politicians are fond of remarking that Britain has a “long and proud” tradition of welcoming refugees, and NGOs and charities reiterate the same claim in the hope of grounding asylum in British cultural values.

But while the Huguenots found sanctuary in the seventeenth century, and Russia’s dissidents sought exile in the nineteenth, closer examination exposes the extent to which asylees’ ‘warm welcome’ has long rested upon the convictions of the few prepared to defy the popular prejudices of the many.

Poor migrants fleeing oppression have always been more feared than applauded in the UK. In 1905, the British Brothers’ League agitated for legislation to restrict (primarily Jewish) immigration from Eastern Europe because of populist fears that Britain was becoming ‘the dumping ground for the scum of Europe’. Similarly, the bravery of individual campaigners who fought to secure German Jews’ visas in the 1930s must be measured against the groundswell of public anti-semitism that resisted mass refugee admissions.

British MPs in 1938 were insistent that ‘it is impossible for us to absorb any large number of refugees here’, and as late as August 1938 the Daily Mail warned against large number of German Jews ‘flooding’ the country. In the US, polls showed that 94% of Americans disapproved of Kristallnacht, 77% thought immigration quotas should not be raised to allow additional Jewish migration from Germany.

All this suggests that Western commitment after 1951 to uphold a new Refugee Convention should not be read as a marker of some innate Western generosity of spirit. Even in 1947, Britain was forcibly returning Soviet POWs to Stalin’s Russia. Many committed suicide en route rather than face the Gulags or execution. When in 1972, Idi Amin expelled Ugandan’s Asians – many of whom were British citizens – the UK government tried desperately to persuade other Commonwealth countries to admit the refugees, before begrudgingly agreeing to act as a refuge of “last resort”. If forty years on the 40,000 Ugandan Asians who settled in the UK are often pointed to as a model refugee success story, this is not because but in spite of the welcome they received.

Many refugee advocates and NGOs are nevertheless wary of picking apart the public belief that a “generous welcome” exists for “real” refugees. The public, after all, are much more likely to be flattered than chastised into donating much needed funds to care for those left destitute – sometime by the deliberate workings of the asylum system itself. But it is important to recognise the more complex and less complacent truths that researchers’ work reveals.

For if we scratch the surface of our asylum policies beneath a shiny humanitarian veneer lies the most cynical kind of politics. Myth making sustains false dichotomies between deserving “refugees” there and undeserving “illegal migrants” here – and conveniently lets us forget that both are fleeing the same wars in the same leaking boats.

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By Matthew Flinders

We all know that the sea is a dangerous place and should be treated with respect but it seems that Australian politicians have taken things a step (possibly even a leap) further. From sharks to asylum seekers the political response appears way out of line with the scale of the risk.

In the United Kingdom the name Matthew Flinders will rarely generate even a glint of recognition, whereas in Australia Captain Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) is (almost) a household name. My namesake was not only the intrepid explorer who first circumnavigated and mapped the continent of Australia but he is also a distant relative whose name I carry with great pride. But having spent the past month acquainting myself with Australian politics I can’t help wonder how my ancestor would have felt about what has become of the country he did so much to put on the map.

The media feeding frenzy and the political response surrounding shark attacks in Western Australia provides a case in point. You are more likely to be killed by a bee sting than to be killed by a shark attack while swimming in the sea off Perth or any of Western Australia’s wonderful beaches. Hundreds of thousands of people enjoy the sea and coastline every weekend but what the media defined as ‘a spate’ of fatal shark attacks (seven to be exact) in between 2010-2013 led the state government to implement no less than 72 baited drum lines along the coast. Australia’s Federal Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, granted the Western Australian Government a temporary exemption from national environment laws protecting great white sharks, to allow the otherwise illegal acts of harming or killing the species. The result of the media feeding frenzy has been the slow death of a large number of sharks. The problem is that of the 173 sharks caught in the first four months none were Great Whites and the vast majority were Tiger Sharks – a species that has not been responsible for a fatal shark attack for decades.

The public continues to surf and swim, huge protests have been held against the shark cull and yet the Premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett, insists that it is the public reaction against the cull that is ‘ludicrous and extreme’ and that it will remain in place for two years.

If the political approach to sharks appears somewhat harsh then the approach to asylum seekers appears equally unforgiving. At one level the Abbott government’s ‘Stop the Boats’ policy has been a success. The end of July witnessed the first group of asylum seekers to reach the Australian mainland for seven months. In the same period last year over 17,000 people in around 200 boats made the treacherous journey across the ocean in order to claim asylum in Australia. ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ has therefore ‘solved’ a political problem that many people believe simply never existed. The solution – as far as one exists – is actually a policy of ‘offshore processing’ that uses naval intervention to direct boats to bureaucratic processing plants on Manus, Nauru, or Christmas Island. Like modern day Robinson Crusoe, thousands of asylum seekers find themselves marooned on the most remote outposts of civilization. But then again – out of sight is out of mind.

The 157 people (including around fifty children) who made it to the mainland last week exemplify the harsh treatment that forms the cornerstone of the current approach. After spending nearly a month at sea on an Australian customs vessel they were briefly flown to the remote Curtin Detention Centre but when the asylum seekers refused to be interviewed by Indian officials they were promptly dispatched to the island of Nauru and its troubled detention centre (riots, suicides, self-mutilation, etc.). Those granted asylum will be resettled permanently on Nauru while those refused will be sent back to Sri Lanka (the country that most of the asylum seekers were originally fleeing via India). Why does the government insist on this approach? Could it be the media rather than the public that are driving political decision-making? A recent report by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that the vast majority of refugees feel welcomed by the Australian public but rejected by the Australian political institutions. How can this mismatch be explained? The economy is booming and urgently requires flexible labor, the asylum seekers want to work and embed themselves in communities; the country is vast and can hardly highlight over-population as the root of the problem.

There is an almost palpable fear of a certain type of ‘foreigner’ within the Australian political culture. Under this worldview the ocean is a human playground that foreign species (i.e. sharks) should not be allowed to visit. The world is changing as human flows become more fluid and fast-paced – no borders are really sovereign any more. And yet in Australia the political system remains wedded to ‘keeping the migration floodgates closed’, apparently unaware of just how cruel and unforgiving this makes Australia look to the rest of the world. What would Captain Matthew Flinders think about this state of affairs almost exactly 200 years after his death?

From sharks to asylum seekers Australian politics seems ‘all at sea’.

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By Edward Shorter

Ben Carey’s thought-provoking article in the New York Times about the treatment of personality disorders in the forthcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association raises two questions:

1. Do disorders of “personality” really exist as natural phenomena, comparable to mania or dementia?

2. If they do exist, do they belong to the clinical specialty of psychiatry, or are they better considered characteristics of the human condition that have little to do with illness? Psychosis and melancholia are real illnesses, comparable to tuberculosis and mumps. Do personality disorders have that status?

Psychiatry’s involvement with personality disorders goes back to the early nineteenth century and the diagnosis of “hysteria”: the female character was considered weak and vulnerable. Women by virtue of their very personalities were deemed more vulnerable than men to feelings and emotional changability. Viennese psychiatry professor Ernst von Feuchtersleben wrote in 1845, “[The causes of] hysteria include everything that increases sensitivity, weakens spontaneity, gives predominance to the sexual sphere, and validates the feelings and drives associated with sexuality.”

In terms of the scientific assessment of personality and its breakdowns, this was not a promising beginning.

Things got worse. In 1888 German psychiatrist Julius Koch said there was such a thing as a personality that was “psychopathically inferior,” a product of genetic degeneration. Such degenerates were not exactly mentally ill, he said, merely unable to get their act together, and also showed “a pathological lack of reproductive drive.”

So psychiatry has always thought there were people who had something really wrong with their characters without being necessarily depressed or psychotic. But how to classify them?

Classification is obsessing the current debate. The struggle over what disorders to identify began with the great German classifier of disease (nosologist) Emil Kraepelin who, in the eighth edition of his Psychiatry textbook in 1915 expanded to seven types the list of “psychopathic personalities” with which he and his colleagues had been working. The list is interesting because it is very different from our own: the “excitable”; the irresolute; those driven by pleasure to seek out alochol, gambling, and who generally become wastrels; the eccentric; the liars and swindlers; and the quarrelsome, sometimes called the querulants.

Doesn’t sound very familiar, does it? That’s because each culture compiles a list of the personality traits it dislikes, or that are harmful to the further flourishing of things; and in Imperial Germany being querulous by challenging authority or being irresolute by not seeing France as the enemy were viewed as disorders.

There was lots yet to come, that I’m going to skip over. But what has most greatly influenced the current debate is the concept of personality disorders laid down by the psychoanalysts, the followers of Freud. Their list is quite different from Kraepelin’s because they were not interested in making war on France but on inner conflicts within the psyche. In 1908 Freud suggested the existence of an “anal” character, poeple who were orderly, tidy and meticulous and who in childhood had somehow come to dwell upon the anal region.

Freud’s followers came up with a whole list of character pathologies: Fritz Wittels’ “hysterical character,” Wilhelm Reich’s notion of “character armor” and its various guises, such as the “compulsive character,” the “phallic-narcissitic character,” and so forth.

We’re getting hot now. The modern concept of personality disorder comes directly to us from the psychoanalysts and from their current desperate desire to stay relevant. In 1938 Adolph Stern laid out a kind of personality disorder that was unresponsive to psychoanalysis, calling it “borderline personality disorder.”

Fourteen years later, in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association took a first cut at personality disorders, in its new DSM series, assigning them to three groups: (1) Those that were constitutional (inborn) in nature and unresponsive to change though psychotherapy, including “inadequate personality” and “paranoid personality”; (2) Those individuals with emotionally “unstable” and “passive aggressive” personalities; and (3) the sociopaths, such as the homosexuals, fetishists and other deviants.

American society in the early 1950s did not like those who deviated from the missionary position, who were inadequate to the challenges of empire-building, and who accepted authority but badmouthed it at the water-cooler.

Wilhelm Reich had laid out the concept of “narcicism” in 1933 and New York psychiatrist Heinz Kohut gave it pride of place in 1971. We are totally mired in the swamp of psychoanalysis here, a swamp that DSM-II in 1968 and DSM-III in 1980 failed to pull us out of, though DSM-III constructed an “axis II,” along which personality disorders could be arrayed, in addition to axis I for the real psychiatric disorders.

So this brings us to the current scene. The most recent edition of the DSM series, DSM-IV in 1994, had a whole slew of personality disorders, including histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, and so forth. The editor of DSM-IV, Allen Frances, was a psychoanalyst, and the list is a kind of last gasp. The problem is that patients who qualified for one, tended to qualify for almost all of them. The individual “disorders” were quite incapable of identifying individuals who had something psychiatrically wrong with them; the “disorders” had become labels for personality characteristics that are found in abundance in the population.

Moreover, who needed labels? Psychiatrists had a seat-of-the pants definition of a PD: “If your first impression of your patient is that he is an asshole, then he probably has a personality disorder.”

And what kind of disorder was this anyway, an illness in which the identified patient thinks he personally is fine but is making everyone around him unhappy? This is not like psychosis.

You can see why the drafters of DSM-V, due this May, have despaired. They wanted something clinically relevant and that also would sound vaguely like science (which psychoanalysis certainly didn’t). It will be interesting to see how the APA sorts this out. Personality disorders exist not as natural phenomena but as cultural phenomena: We as a society need some way of identifying people who can’t quite get it all together. But is this an illness that psychiatrists can treat? In the way that they treat schizophrenia with Zyprexa and depression with Prozac? What do we, as a society in 2012, do with people who can’t quite get it all together? I’m asking you.

Edward Shorter is an internationally-recognized historian of psychiatry and the author of numerous books, including A History of Psychiatry from the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (1997), Before Prozac (2009), and the forthcoming How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown. Shorter is the Jason A. Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine and a Professor of Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. Read his previous OUPblog posts.

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Image credit: Dissolving fractured head. Photo by morkeman, iStockphoto.

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Because you may in fact have grown weary of listening to me go on about the You Are My Only Treasure Hunt, I introduce this final clues installment with pictures of puppies.  Everyone still loves puppies, right?  And especially ones with hats.

In any case, here we go.  The fifth and final guest post telling the story behind the story of You Are My Only has now gone live out there in the blogosphere.  This one appears on a blogger site that I find visually fascinating and deeply textured, like the best designed Project Runway dress (I'm thinking Mondo crossed with Anya).  This blogger (who is herself a fine writer) describes herself as a pain in the you know what (but I rather love her), has a close relationship to Hicklebee's (she's the resident blogger), wears tiaras, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.  I do not know if she dances.

Post 5 begins like this:

If you’ve been following these blog posts, then you understand already that I don’t write my books in some preordained sequential fashion. I don’t outline a plot; I don’t consult the trends; I don’t go with the fashions. I write about what will not let me sleep, and over time, and through countless drafts, the separate aspects of my obsessions knit themselves into a story.

One of the things that was keeping me awake at night while I was working on this book was the stories I kept reading about urban explorers—those fascinating souls who explore abandoned buildings, often illegally, and create entire underworlds within them. For many years, a northeast Philadelphia asylum known to many as Byberry was a favorite haunting ground for these folks. This gigantic structure had been left to rot after being shut down in the 1990s, and the urban explorers (or “cavers” as they are sometimes known) had taken over—held rave parties there, ridden their motorcycles through connective tunnels, dug through the patient records and film reels and all the wild and disturbing “stuff” that had been so haphazardly left behind.

Your job is to find this post and to also find the four other posts that very kind bloggers have lodged on their blogs.  If you do that—find all five posts, put the links on your own blog, and send me proof of your cross linking in any comment box by October 24—you will be entered into a drawing.  The two randomly chosen winners will each win a signed copy of You Are My Only as well as an opportunity to have 2,000 words from a work in progress be critiqued by yours truly.  For the full details go here.  Winners will be announced October 25, the day that You Are My Only launches.

Here, again, are the clues.

Post 4 is housed at the psychodelically-hued (we know that isn't a real term) home of a certain chick who loves lit.  I met this wonderful person at the BEA this past summer.  She was part of the awesome gang of many who surprised me with a YAMO blast a month or so again.  The post you are looking for begins like this:

Those who know me know that I’m only intermittently good at devising titles.

Undercover was called Come Back to Me, for example, until Laura Geringer asked me to please think again on that one. Still Love in Strange Places was named by my son moments b

5 Comments on The You Are My Only Treasure Hunt Final Installment: What about that asylum?, last added: 10/14/2011

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Serena said, on 10/12/2011 10:01:00 AM

I had fun with the treasure hunt.

Anna Lefler said, on 10/12/2011 10:11:00 AM

This is co cool!

I hope all your readers are out there tweeting this to get the word out...

XOXO

A.

Wendy said, on 10/12/2011 9:12:00 PM

Ha ha - what fun! I found them all and posted them here: http://www.caribousmom.com/2011/10/12/you-are-my-only-treasure-hunt/

Bonnie Jacobs said, on 10/13/2011 3:23:00 AM

I left the link to my blog about your five guest posts where you announced the treasure hunt. Is this where it should be? Either way, here's my link:
http://bonniesbooks.blogspot.com/2011/10/blog-hop-treasure-hunt.html

Serena said, on 10/14/2011 2:30:00 AM

Here is my post for the treasure hunt: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2011/10/you-are-my-only-by-beth-kephart-treasure-hunt-giveaway.html

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When I finish a draft, I read it aloud in order to clean up spelling errors that cannot be caught by spellcheck. I also find lines that don't flow well, other little bits that need cleaning up. This time I realized I really did have to include that final scene that I thought I could leave out. The irony is I had started to write it, then thought "oh no, they'll think the play was over with the last scene. I'd better just cut this out." So I deleted it, didn't save a scrap. When I read the play aloud, I thought what? where's the rest of the play? Just like my audience would have. Too abrupt. Fortunately, I had the beat sheet right there in front of me, so I knew what was lacking. This morning I wrote that scene -- again -- this time, fully, and finally. Much better.
I also took a gigantic risk and sent the play out to a producer who is looking for material for Fertile Ground. I am already planning to have this play in Fertile Ground, but if it is accepted, I will let them produce it instead. I will do something else. I sent the producer two plays. Maybe they will choose the other one. Or neither one. Submitting plays is always a risk, a risk of rejection. But if you don't send them out, they will never be produced. And I write mine with the assumption that I will see them onstage at some point. I love the act of collaborating with the producer, the director, the designers, the actors, everyone involved.
I have co-founded and founded theatre companies myself, so I know the work involved, and I know that it is hard, that it takes a ton of organization, of commitment, and I also know that it needs to be fun. No one wants to work with people who are jerks, or who don't follow through, or don't pull their own weight. I love to do my part. I love to hear what others bring to the table. I like hearing others' feedback about my plays, and I will let it in. I want my plays to entertain audiences, so I try to create good stories. I know that other theatre artists may know more about certain aspects of the story that I'm telling than I do. So my ears and my heart is open.
For one of my plays (The Godmother) I have grandiose dreams. It would make a fun and interesting serial. Either live onstage, or on TV. I don't have the money to produce it myself or I would. Then I would produce live serial versions every year. Why? Because I believe in the characters in this play. Everyone of them is real and deep and interesting to me. They deserve to have their stories told. Maybe someday.

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Asylum No More is the title I'm trying out today for my new play. One of my playwright friends suggested Asylum. I like it. I like a few more words.
When you see the above title, what do you picture in your mind, or hear in your head? Do you think no more sanctuary? Or the end of an insane asylum? Maybe both? Both would be ideal. Either one is good.
The one word title could be good as well. Because it means both things: sanctuary and loony bin. My protagonist works at the State Asylum. She helps people escape. By the end of the play, she will leave the asylum forever, and she will also try to put an end to the hospital itself.
I've decided on which characters are necessary for the play. I've outlined it. I've done the 15 beat sheet. I have a working title. In the next couple of days I will begin writing scenes. Today I have a murderous migraine that I can't treat until late tonight because I have an event I cannot miss. The young woman I mentored when she was in high school has finally returned to college as an adult and is graduating from college tonight, and has invited me. I wouldn't dream of missing this special occasion. So today, I'm working on the title only. I'm wondering what your thoughts are about my title? Any suggestions or comments?

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This morning I'm celebrating two extraordinary picture books.

The first, featuring photographs by the exquisite Christopher Payne and an introduction by Oliver Sacks, is called Asylum. Presenting some of the most moving images I have ever seen, this book takes us on a tour of the institutions that have served as home to this country's mentally ill. There are no people in these photographs—just a wall of toothbrushes, say, or canisters of ashes, or beleaguered ward hallways lit up by sun. Taunton State Hospital, Matteawan State Hospital, Concord State Hospital, and Springfield State Hospital are here; so is the operating room of Norristown and the coffins of Fergus Falls. Every single photograph is breathtaking; I bought the book two months ago and I still don't have the words to express my deep respect for the artistry of Payne.

The second book I'm celebrating today is Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans/Expanded Edition. We had seen the Americans exhibition at San Francisco MOMA, and I'd fallen in love with Frank's depiction of America, mid-last century, with its spewing politicians and its through-the-screen-door barber shops, its movie stars and its road trips. This compendium is graced by in-depth Sarah Greenough essays, context-proving contact sheets, and truly interesting explications of Frank's approach to maquettes and juxtaposition. Looking In was my big Christmas present this year, and it is big—so heavy, so wide that I have yet to figure out how to perch it on my lap. But it should not be/cannot be relegated to coffee table status. It demands to be studied and read.

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More of me or mine.... click, please.

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