Butrus Ajak

Onshore Asylum Seekers Mental Health Butrus Ajak

Evidence suggests that Australia mandatory detention policy is associated with mental illness among asylum seekers in both onshore facilities and community arrangements. The objective of this review is to critically examine mandatory detention policy with a focus on onshore asylum seekers in detention facilities and community arrangements. The databases searched for this literature review includes articles and reports written between January 1st, 1992 to April 30th, 2013. The databases searched are: EBSCOhost, Google scholar, Informit among many others. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were developed and once this was performed key words were used to search the relevant databases for relevant information. Literature that addressed onshore asylum seekers? mental health was the focus of this review. The literature initially identified 4,161 studies and 66 studies met the inlusion criteria and rest were excluded. This literature review builds on and extends the work previously done by scholars on the health and wellbeing of onshore asylum seekers in Australia.