Blame them, because they drove themselves mad

This is my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday, today.

A research project has found that African migrants in Malta are 12 times more likely than the Maltese to suffer psychosis, which means any form of mental illness that causes one to lose touch with reality.

With African migrants, the number works out at 400 in 100,000 – not that there are 100,000 African migrants in Malta or ever will be. That number is just for comparative purposes. With Maltese people, it’s 32 in 100,000. And apparently, even that is quite high, but the research, or at least media reports about it, does not concern itself with the reasons why Maltese people turn psychotic. I have some ideas myself, but won’t go into them either.

The study, carried out by Nigel Camilleri, Rachel Taylor-East and Anton Grech, who is head of psychiatry at Mount Carmel Hospital, confirms what we could only have taken to be obvious before. People who go through that level of suffering, coupled with the severance of all ties with family, friends and country of origin, followed by a terrible journey, detention and a life in limbo, might well crack up. What strikes me, given the terrible privations most African immigrants have had to endure and are enduring still, is not how high the figure is, but how surprisingly low. How do people go through all that and stay sane?

Compassion and concern was, of course, manifest on the comments-board beneath the story on timesofmalta.com. One person suggested that it is the Maltese who are suffering increased levels of mental illness, due to the burdens imposed by African immigrants.

Another, the ubiquitous Louise Vella, asked why the Ministry of Health does not tell us how much “illegal immigrants” cost the National Health Service and Maltese taxpayers. She doesn’t know that taxpayers in Malta are not necessarily Maltese and very many of them, indeed, are not Maltese at all. Why, some of them are even African immigrants.

Another said that immigrants – by which I suppose he means refugees or asylum seekers – are succumbing to mental illness because they don’t want to be in Malta, so “the EU” should take them and spare them the suffering. It’s the European Union’s fault” – and here again, he misses the point that Malta is part of that European Union.

One person, who uses the nickname ‘Jay Oatmon’, wrote that if “these guys” (like all far-right-wingers, he factors women out of the equation) were to apply to come to Malta legally, they would be rejected on mental health grounds. Where he got that idea is anyone’s guess, but he didn’t seem to understand that the psychosis develops here, in Malta. One assumes quite sensibly that psychotic people cannot cross a desert and make arrangements to buy their passage in a rickety boat to Malta.

Victor Bonello, regular champion of our poor soldiers and policemen (round of applause and Ave salutes here) wrote that facts and figures on psychosis among immigrants should make us “appreciate even further what the police and soldiers looking after these people are risking” – presumably by looking after the equivalent of Jack Nicholson in The Shining and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or perhaps even Hannibal Lecter − and that the government should not have “practically abolished foreign Millioners form settling in Malta” only to allow this situation instead.

Louise Vella popped back to tell us that it’s bad enough that African immigrants bring tuberculosis and HIV with them, and “now we are told that there is a high incidence of mental illness too”. She must think it’s catching, and if she wakes up one morning to check her temperature and finds that she has mental illness, she’ll blame Them.

Somebody else popped in to say that Dr Grech and his co-researchers should bother to study “how much mental illness these illegal immigrants are causing the Maltese people”. This particular remark had me fascinated. Why would any Maltese man or woman feel so personally responsible for and burdened by African immigrants that he or she would collapse into psychosis? There must be sink-holes of Maltese society containing phenomena even stranger than I thought possible.

I read right through the parade of comments, most of them from the usual suspects, and got up to make a strong cup of builder’s tea to settle my nerves. Reading these things at length and on a regular basis is quite enough to make one mentally ill, and the people writing them quite often seem psychotic themselves.

It would have been reassuring to see at least one comment from somebody showing concern about the nature of the care these unhappy individuals receive, instead of how much that care costs. They ask how much the care costs the (Maltese) taxpayer before they ask whether the mentally ill receive any care at all, and if so, whether it is adequate.

The contempt they show for other human beings, who they quite curiously perceive to be harming them personally, is quite incredible. The general gist seems to be: blame them, because they drove themselves mad. And now we have to pay for it too.