ARTICLE IN PRESS

Health & Place 14 (2008) 254264

www.elsevier.com/locate/healthplace

Corrosive places, inhuman spaces: Mental health

in Australian immigration detention
Pauline McLoughlina,, Megan Warinb,1
a

Discipline of Gender, Work and Social Inquiry, School of Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia
b
Department of Anthropology, Durham University, 43 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP, UK

Received 21 November 2006; received in revised form 1 June 2007; accepted 19 June 2007

Abstract
Since their establishment in 1992, Australian Immigration Detention Centres have been the focus of increasing concern
due to allegations of their serious impact on the mental health of asylum seekers. Informed by Foucaults treatise on
surveillance and the phenomenological work of Casey, this paper extends the current clinical data by examining the
architecture and location of detention centres, and the complex relationships between space, place and mental health. In
spatialising these relationships, we argue that Immigration Detention Centres operate not only as Panopticons, but are
embodied by asylum seekers as anti-places: as places that mediate and constitute thinned out and liminal experiences. In
particular, it is the embodied effects of surveillance and suspended liminality that impact on mental health. An approach
which locates the embodiment of place and space as central to the poor mental health of asylum seekers adds an important
dimension to our understandings of (dis)placement and mental health in the lives of the exiled.
r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Anti-place; Mental health; Asylum seekers; Embodiment; Surveillance; Suspended liminality

Introduction
For more than a decade, the Immigration
Detention Centre (or IDC) has sat at the heart of
hard-line asylum seeker policy in Australia. Underlying its evolution are long-standing cultural anxieties surrounding so-called boat people, which
resurfaced publicly in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Concerns about a feared ood of asylum seekers
Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 402 903 943.

E-mail addresses: pauline.mcloughlin@adelaide.edu.au

(P. McLoughlin), megan.warin@durham.ac.uk (M. Warin).
1
Tel.: +44 191 3346177.
1353-8292/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2007.06.008

from South-East Asia and China fuelled a strong

political reaction from the Australian Government
at the time (Human Rights and Equal Opportunities
Commission (HREOC), 2004, p. 141). This culminated in 1992 with the passing of mandatory
detention legislation in an attempt to safeguard
Australian sovereignty. Subsumed within Federal
immigration law, this legislation requires that any
unauthorised arrival (i.e., any non-citizen lacking
valid documentation such as a visa or passport)
who enters Australian territory or who is intercepted in the nations migration zone, will be held in
an IDC until a decision can be made on their status
(HREOC, 2001).

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The process of reviewing and determining claims

can take anywhere between 2 and 7 years to resolve,
and during this time asylum seekers and their
children are held in detention. Immigration Detention Centres are typically located in isolated areas of
Australia: on the fringes of capital cities; lost within
semi-arid and desert regions, and (as is increasingly
the case) on small Pacic islands (such as Christmas
island) which are funded by the Federal Government to process asylum seekers. In 2006, plans
were announced to expand the offshore processing
of asylum seekers and illegal shermen on a
oating prison under the Australian Federal
Governments Pacic Solution policy (cf. Rajaram,
2003).
When held up to the asylum seeker policies of
other industrialised countries, the severity of Australias approach remains unparalleled: in terms of
the sheer length of detention, the blanket nature in
which undocumented asylum seekers are detained,
and the lack of independent review of the system
(Silove, 2003). Evidence points to this approach as
being directly responsible for the increasing incidence of mental illness and self-harm amongst
asylum seekers, most particularly contributing to
ongoing post-traumatic stress disorders, depression
and associated disability (Steel et al., 2004, 2006).2
As well as concerns being raised by researchers and
health professionals, the situation has not gone
unnoticed by prominent lawyers and legal reform
groups, political journalists such as Mares (2002),
the United Nations High Commissioner on Human
Rights, Amnesty International and the Australian
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
(HREOC, 2005). Despite the recent rush of reforms
foreshadowing the tenuous release of many longterm detainees and children, and the establishment
of residential housing arrangements for children
and their mothers, the mandatory detention ethos of
the policy remains rmly in place.
Currently, the literature that examines the incidence and experience of mental health in IDCs
takes a biomedical approach to studying health and
illness, in which place is taken for granted as a
backdrop or container for ill health. An example of
how setting is understood can be seen in the position
statement of Sainsbury, the former president of the
Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA,
2
Silove and Steel (1998) for example, document the alarming
incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and
generalised anxiety disorders among Australian asylum seekers.

255

2002), who characterised detention centres as

psychosocially destructive environments (PHAA,
2002). Sainsbury acknowledges the negative psychological effects of detention; of an environment
which contains and traps people in a dened space.
Similarly, Silove (a prominent Australian psychiatrist and critic of detention conditions) describes
detention settings as unstable, insecure and hostile,
and more likely to lead to long-term mental health
problems than a setting which is supportive, secure
and safe. The effect of immigration detention spaces
is thus understood as eroding personal and social
resources for coping, and exacerbating vulnerabilities and posttraumatic stress (Silove, 2003). The
actual relationship or mechanisms by which the
environment and mental health interact is left
unexamined.
It is precisely this relationship between detention
spaces/places and the poor mental health of
detained asylum seekers that we seek to address in
this paper. Health geographers (cf. Kearns, 1993;
Kearns and Moon, 2002; Dyck, 2006) and anthropologists (cf. Low and Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003;
Warin, 2000, 2005) have been critical of the
unproblematic rendering of space and place and
have argued that health cannot be separated from
place; that is, from the meanings and experiences
inscribed and evoked in spaces. In this sense,
placing the mental health of Australias detained
asylum seekers not only involves looking at the
detention centre as a purely geographic location,
built setting or site for administrative processes
(that is, a space), but more importantly extends to
what the detention environment means for those
contained within it; how space is embodied and
experienced, and the broader social consequences it
may have. We are also called upon to understand
how those managing asylum seekers and those
outside the detention space play a central role in
shaping the mental health of detained asylum
seekers: by forming an active part of the cultural
and structural milieux.
The paper is organised as follows. Firstly, we
describe the location and architecture of Australian
IDCs in the context of Foucaults panopticon, and
its direct links with surveillance, power and control.
The panopticon, however, is limited as it does not
account for the agency of bodies, nor the phenomenological orientation of bodies. Here, we use
Caseys work to extend the operation of Foucaults
disciplinary power. We argue that it is the panopticon design and location of detention centres that

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creates an anti-place, a term coined by Casey to

describe the thinned out and profoundly negative
effects of modern (and institutional) space. Akin to
Bourdieus theory of habitus, Caseys conceptualisation of place positions the body as central, as a
geographical self that contests the dichotomies
that hold the self apart from body and place (Casey,
2001, p. 684).
In bringing together Foucaults poststructuralist
account of power with the phenomenologically
orientated philosophy of Casey, we demonstrate
points of convergence between the two approaches.
Foucault provides us with the analytical tools by
which to understand the architecture of connement
and Casey allows us to examine the subsequent
bodily incorporation of such connement. These
two theoreticians compliment each other, for they
examine the spaces occupied by the body, and the
perception and experience of that space. It is, as
Low and Lawrence-Zuniga (2003, p. 2) suggest,
through the embodiment of space that an understanding of a persons emotions and state of mind,
sense of self, social relations and cultural predispositions can be understood. In the asylum seeker
context, it is the embodiment of (and resistance to)
disciplinary power through surveillance and liminality that we investigate.
As one might expect, the range and availability of
research evidence into the incidence of mental
health in detainee populations is limited. As Steel
et al. (2004) have noted in their study into the
psychiatric status of asylum seeker families in
remote Australian detention centres, there are
restrictions of access to populations, the possibility of transcultural errors in diagnostic instruments, and difculties in verifying verbal reports.
Mares and Jureidini (2004, p. 520) also note how
medical and allied health staff working in IDCs
are subject to contracts that prohibit speaking
publicly. Despite these restrictions, the evidence
strongly suggests that there is a coherence of data
across different research projects, and a convergence with clinical observations and reports of
extensive inquiries undertaken by the Commonwealth government in detention centres. It is from
this primary data, and Inquiry reports, that we
make our case.
Architectural discipline
It is tempting, when writing about the spaces in
which those seeking refuge are detained, to turn to

Fig. 1. The isolated, exclusionary locations of Australias

Immigration Detention Centres (source: HREOC (2003). Section
1: Questions and answers about refugees and asylum seekers in
Face the Facts (third ed.). Canberra: 18). *Note: Woomera,
Cocos Island, Curtin, Port Hedland and Papua New Guinea
(Manus Island) IDCs are no longer operating.

the political philosophy of Agamben. Gregory,

for example, in his critique of the Bush administrations political theology, argues that Camp
X-ray at Guantanamo Bay is an iconic example
of that paradoxical space which Agamben describes as the state of exception (Gregory, 2006,
p. 405). This state of exception is peculiar to the
cartography of Guantanamo Bay and its placement within legal geographies, for the prison is
simultaneously outside the United States (where
captives can be held indenitely), and within the
United States in order to permit co-ercive interrogation. Australian IDCs do not fall into this
paradoxical position as they are (with the exception
of the Pacic island nation of Nauru), both
geographically and legally placed within Australian
territories.
Despite the dissimilarity of sovereign power and
law in these cases, Agambens philosophy is useful
in the Australian context for understanding the
exceptional placement of IDCs in excluded and
abandoned zones. As Fig. 1 demonstrates, detention
centres are geographically placed at the margins of
mainstream populations, located away from major
towns and cities, either on the urban outskirts (as in
the Villawood IDC) or more notoriously in remote
coastal, desert or semi-arid regions (see for example,
Fig. 1 and Plate 2). Some (as in the case of the
Woomera IDC) have historically been sites of
British government nuclear weapons testing, a US
military base until the late 1990s, and have more

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Plate 1. Razor wire perimeter fences at Villawood IDC. Source:

ChilOut (2007a) (http://www.chilout.org/gallery/centres.html#
Maribyrnong).

recently been proposed sites for a low grade nuclear

waste repository.3
These locations are, with little historical regard
for their Indigenous inhabitants, identied as a nomans land; marginal spaces where social unmentionables and dangerous wastes are located and
removed from mainstream society. Bauman goes as
far to suggest that as outsiders, refugees become
human waste, and are sealed off in tightly closed
containers (Bauman, 2004, p. 85). Reinforcing their
sealed off and marginalised placement, the architectures of mainland centres are fronted by highsecurity reinforced gates or entrances; surrounded
by heavy fencing topped by razor wire (see for
example Plate 1); divided into building blocks;
controlled by security checkpoints, and dominated
by the presence of privately contracted correctional
management guards (as demonstrated in Plates 1
and 3). On Pacic islands, offshore detention centre
conditions are more rudimentary, taking on the
make-shift enclosed shanty aspects of a prison camp
or developing world refugee camp, managed by the
private contractors International Organisation for
Migration (IOM) (Manne, 2004).
The high security design and geographic marginalisation of the detention space create a clear
physical and socially symbolic division between
the outside world and those who are held within. In
an interview with the HREOC in the 1990s, this
visceral sense of isolation was powerfully related by
3
For more information on the use of Woomera and Maralinga
lands as sites for British nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s, see
Eames and Collett (1985).

257

Plate 2. Arid, isolated location of Baxter IDC in South

Australias interior. Source: Chilout (2007b) (http://www.chilout.
org/gallery/port_hedland.html).

Plate 3. Detention guards in riot uniform at Port Hedland IRPC.

Source: Chilout (2007c) (http://www.chilout.org/gallery/port_
hedland.html).

one 16-year-old Cambodian boy who had been held

at the Port Hedland IDC for 5 years:
Port Hedland is a very isolated place. The
detention centre is near the ocean and there are
high fences all around the outside of the building,
separating the centre from the rest of the world.
(HREOC, 1998, p. 218)
Access to detention centres is subject to stringent
security checks, procedures and restrictions which
are designed to regulate and control the visitors
experience of detention and discourage outsiders
from entering the detention space (Sultan and
OSullivan, 2001; Phillips, 2000). No media are

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P. McLoughlin, M. Warin / Health & Place 14 (2008) 254264

allowed into the centres without explicit approval

and regulated visits, so representations of life in
detention are tightly controlled by the governing
agencies.
Douglas offers us a way of theorising why asylum
seekers might be inserted into this type of landscape
and architecture. In her (Douglas, 1966) anthropological theory of purity and pollution, Douglas
argues that people and objects that do not conform
to or cross social boundaries and categories (such as
eels and worms that inhabit water, though not as
sh) are deemed anomalous, out of place, and often
dirty and dangerous. Asylum seekers fall into this
anomalous category as they are boundary crossers
and are quintessentially out of place; and thus
represented as marginalised and dangerous. Indeed,
Douglas theory of matter out of place allows us to
see why asylum seekers are discursively constructed
as out of line queue jumpers (when in fact there is
often no queue to join in countries of origin) and
alarmingly characterised (by popular discourses and
Australian politicians) as dangerous terrorists and
a threat to the Australian body politic.4
Directly opposing this negative positioning of the
dangerous asylum seeker, the genuine and ofcial
refugee as recognised under the 1951 United Nations
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (the
Convention), and subsumed in Australias Migration
Act 1958, has come to occupy a protected and
acceptable legal and political category, by virtue of
their perceived genuineness under a legally determinate trail of ofcial paperwork (Turner, 2002, p.
22). As Turner (2002) demonstrates, the discourse of
the genuine (and therefore acceptable) refugee is
bound up in images and metaphors of the helpless
victim of persecution, carrying valid written
evidence of their legitimate claim for crossing
national borders. This image of genuine victimhood, and therefore trustworthiness and familiarity, remains diametrically opposed in prevailing
political discourses to the undocumented, transgressive and unfamiliar asylum seeker; one who
carries no visible evidence of their validity as
victim, and thus stands as potential fraud and foe
(Turner, 2002).
The power of such ideological justications for
the detainment and disciplining of asylum seekers in
Australia is incredibly pervasive. The deeply embedded social constructions, anxieties and conten4

Sibley (1995) similarly uses Douglas foundational work in his

examination of geographies of exclusion and border crossings.

tions bound up in the border crossings of asylum

seekers remain central to the continued presence of
the detention system in the national landscape and
imagination. This is despite substantial evidence to
contradict asylum seekers disingenuous reputation. For instance, although the personal histories
of persecution and trauma which asylum seekers
must recount are subject to a high degree of
suspicion and skepticism by interviewing ofcials
throughout the process of determining their claims
(Silove, 2003; Sultan and OSullivan, 2001), Federal
Government statistics show that 85% of detained
asylum seekers in Australia are eventually recognised as genuine refugees (Steel and Silove, 2001). As
Steel and Silove (2001) argue, this high rate of
approval in the determination process shows that a
majority of asylum seekers have ofcially suffered
at least the same level of persecution as those who
have come to Australia as genuine refugees or with
other valid documentation under the Migration
Act 1958.
Silove (2003, p. 75) reafrms this irony in his
review of research into the mental health of asylum
seekers, arguing that on average, detained asylum
seekers demonstrate experiences of persecution and
trauma consistent with the overall level of persecution experienced by displaced populations as a
whole. Moreover, there exist stark differences in the
refugee determination approval rates between
detained asylum seekers (of whom 85% are
eventually granted refugee status), and community-based asylum seekers who entered Australia
with a valid visa (of whom just 28% were granted
refugee status in 1998) (Hosking et al., 1998, p. 20).
As Steel and Silove (2001) argue, this may be an
indicator that detained asylum seekers are in fact
more likely to have had a well-founded fear of
persecution prior to displacement (UNHCR, 2003),
and hence to be genuine, legally protected refugees,
than their asylum seeker compatriots who entered
Australia with valid documentation.
Despite this evidence, the prevailing criminalising
discourses surrounding the undocumented asylum
seeker continue to imprison them within a system of
control and discipline throughout the determination
process. Although the Department of Immigration
and Citizenship (DIC)5 (formerly the Department
of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA)
5
See: DIC website: Immigration Detention Contract Schedule
2. Detention Services. /http://www.immi.gov.au/detention/
group4/002_schedule_2.pdfS.

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(DIMA, 2007) asserts that immigration detention

has been established as a setting for administrative
rather than punitive purposes, the detention space
ts the model of disciplinary power outlined by
Foucault (1977) in his analytical framework of the
panopticon. Designed as a prison by the architect
Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon is an annular
building that has a peripheral ring of individual
cells, facing out to a central guarded tower. Each
cell has two windows, one facing the tower and the
other the outside, assuring constant backlighting.
Prisoners are thus constantly aware of the minute
regulation of bodily and other visible activities, and
the power this provides to the unseen guards.
Bentham hailed the design as revolutionary for it
reversed the principles of the dungeon to deprive of
light and to hide, and instead uses visibility as its
trap (Foucault, 1977, p. 200).
While there are differences in the planning of
IDCs and the panopticon, it is not the empirical
accuracy of Benthams design that is of concern, but
the principles and mechanisms of disciplinary power
that are of importance to this argument. The
physical location and architectural features of IDCs
are modelled on prisons, in that they aim to
maximise surveillance, visibility and connement,
in order to maximise disciplinary power.
Daily routines and everyday aspects of life (such
as freedom of movement, choice and range of food,
clothing and bedding; the ability to access health
and legal services, to enjoy recreation, to work and
learn, and to contact family and friends), are subject
to the approval, surveillance, restrictions and rules
of detention staff, government ofcials and the
detention space itself. As Koutroulis (2003) (a
mental health nurse who formerly worked with
asylum seekers in the now closed Woomera Detention Centre) argues, every aspect of an asylum
seekers life is regimented by queues, paperwork,
procedures and the constant presence of authorities.
Stoller (2003, p. 2265) refers to the regimentation
of spaces within the modern, predominantly western
prison as fragile homes for inmates, vulnerable at
any time to destruction and invasion by the
panoptic system of control which governs the
prison. Foucault (1977, p. 140) similarly writes of
such meticulousness of y regulations, the fussiness
of y inspections, the supervision of the smallest
fragment of life and of the body y in the context of
the school, the barracks, the hospital or the workshop y. As in detention centres, the ultimate
purpose of these innitesimal observations is

259

control via technologies of power, and (as described

in Foucaults later works on sexuality and governmentality), the micro-level technologies of the self.
While we recognise Foucaults own theoretical shift
in understanding power (from a hegemonic force to
technologies of self (Foucault, 1980)), the regimentation of IDCs ultimately restricts the freedom and
autonomy of asylum seekers and places control
thoroughly in the grasp of the detention space and
those who hold authority.
Fragile states: embodying anti-place
At the centre of asylum seekers experiences of the
IDC, there is an overwhelming sense of the
detention space as a prison. In the words of one
formerly detained asylum seeker, [We are] not
refugees here; we are prisoners in this country, being
bashed up and beaten (Joint Standing Committee
on Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2001, p. 104). Among
the long term detained, its design and purpose
create a sense of being unjustly conned, isolated
and deprived of power; of languish[ing] in detention without a crime (Amor and Austin, 2003, p.
106). These feelings of injustice, estrangement and
loss of control are experienced through the architecture, location and processes of the IDC space
itself, and are bound up in the very nature of the
detention space as an institutional site or antiplace.
In his book, The Fate of Place, Casey (1997)
refers to the site or the anti-place in the growing
tendency of modern spaces (such as institutions) to
act as limited, rigid, thinned-out settings. Drawing
upon the work of Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault,
he describes such sites as the:
y leveled-down, emptied-out, planiform residuum of place and space eviscerated of their
actual and virtual powers and forced to t the
requirements of institutions that demand certain
very particular forms of building. (Casey, 1997,
p. 183)
As Casey (1993, 1997, 2001) argues, a salient
feature of the site is its emphasis on situating
objects and people within an unending system of
relative, dehumanising, highly circumscribed positions. Rather than nurturing and encompassing the
rich, dynamic nuances of meaning, position and
identity which are characteristic of place, the site
restricts and controls those who inhabit it, both
physically and socially. By limiting the depth and

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range of meaning and social mobility typically

inscribed in place, Casey (2001) proposes that sites
also put limits on the building of identity, social
meaning, connection and the negotiation of space.
Caseys (1993) descriptions of site as eviscerated
place (p. 185), the antidote to place (p. 186), and
the very undoing of place, its dismantling into
punctiform positions y predelineated and precise
(p. 186) strongly invoke its nature as the anti-place:
an institutionalised, functionally driven regulation
and division of space.
These anti-places are not simply implicated in
poor mental health, but are crucial to understanding
the connections between place and ill-health. In the
following section, we examine the embodied effects
of anti-place on asylum seekers, arguing that a more
nuanced reading of place is required in order to
capture the simultaneous closed, yet suspended,
nature of space.
Suspended in time: liminality and mental illness
The anthropological literature on liminality is
useful to understanding the links between anti-place
and mental health. Van Gennep (1960) and Turners
(1982) concept of rites of passage and transition
provide a framework to understand how people
move from one state of being to another in
traditional (and modern) societies, particularly
through the use of myth and ritual. The basic
premise is that one is separated from the main social
group, enters a state of liminality (of anomalous
betwixt and between), and is nally returned to the
group, transformed into a different status. Several
authors (Barrett, 1998; Frankenberg, 1986; Murphy
et al., 1988) have used this concept of liminality to
understand certain states of disease (notably chronic
illness such as schizophrenia and disability) and the
stigma applied to transitional modes of being.
Turner himself declares that liminality may be the
scene of disease, death, despair, suicide, the breakdown without compensatory replacement of normative social ties and bonds. It may be anomie,
alienation, angst, the three fatal Alpha sisters of
many myths (Turner, 1982, p. 46).
This liminal state is precisely where asylum
seekers nd themselves; taken away from their
homelands and stripped of personhood, they
occupy an indeterminate space in which they are
rendered structurally invisible. The uncertain and
prolonged duration of liminality means that detainees are not reincorporated into society, but become

trapped in a permanent and frozen liminal state.

The effect of this suspended liminality, as Turner
might suggest, is to lock detainees in a state of
transition which not only restricts their own movement through space and time, but renders their
personhood and status anomalous. They have no
way of knowing whether they will leave the IDC as
a person with a temporary protection visa or be
repatriated home as an illegal non-person.
Suspension in time and space engenders tremendous uncertainty about the future and magnies the
sense of lost freedom and connection. Unlike
criminals who know the parameters of their
sentence, asylum seekers have no parameters or
limits, and spend hours looking into the unbounded
spaces that surround detention centres. Such boredom and frustration is conated with a growing
sense of helplessness and hopelessness. Boredom is
a big problem, one asylum seeker wrote to the
HREOC in 1997, we do not y know what our
future is y In the detention centre we pass a day as
if it were a year, all our hopes dashed to pieces,
despaired, puzzled (HREOC, 1998, p. 221). Steel
et al. (2004, p. 528) found that boredom was the
primary experience for children and posed a serious
problem during the time spent within the detention
centre environment. This stretched out, liminal
experience of space and time acts, as Silove (2003)
argues, to imprison asylum seekers within a continuum of anxiety and despair, where past traumas
and future uncertainties are exacerbated and continuous with a psychologically corrosive present,
embedded in the IDC space itself. The effects of this
continuum of anxiety are encapsulated by Amal:
I was carrying a mountain of burdens when I
came seeking hope, seeking asylum in Australia.
My expectation was Australia would remove the
burden from me. Unfortunately, upon my
arrival, my burdens increased and my suffering
led me to a new state of madness in Australia.
(Samira et al., 2001, p. 1)
In this way, the temporo-spatial restrictions of the
detention centre become embodied by asylum
seekers, practiced and reproduced in the routines
and mundane activities of their daily lives.
The stripping of personhood that occurs in
suspended liminality goes hand in hand with the
dehumanising treatment of asylum seekers. Authors
such as Koutroulis (2003), Silove (2003), McGorry
(2002), Sultan and OSullivan (2001) and Phillips
(2000) argue that practices within IDCs have the

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effect of transforming human to animal (Koutroulis, 2003, p. 383), and asylum seeker into criminal.
Koutroulis (2003, p. 383), for example, describes the
Woomera IDC nursing managements decision to
administer medication to asylum seekers through a
wire fence like animals in a zoo, fed at particular
times of the day fodder that was their due (2003,
p. 383) as an ethically appalling attempt to deny the
legitimacy of asylum seekers protests by dehumanising and demoralising them. A similar notorious
example of dehumanisation occurred at Abu
Ghraib, where Iraqi prisoners were photographed
naked with dog leashes around their necks. In these
examples, asylum seekers are bestowed with the
particular cultural meanings of a bare life, a form
of existence where human and political rights are
separated and suspended, and in which asylum
seekers are denied human rights taken for granted
by citizenship (Agamben, 1998). It is the anomalous
positioning of those trapped in liminal spaces which
afford such bare life.
As well as these dehumanising dimensions, the
detention anti-place acts to criminalise asylum
seekers through the use of solitary connement,
and the practice of addressing asylum seekers by an
assigned number rather than their names (HREOC,
2001). There are obvious parallels to the way in
which convicted prisoners are identied within the
penal system, as this detainee explains:
When I arrive in this country I had a name
and my feeling was the same as human but
for two years I have been called by initials
and a number and I dont feel and think now
the same as human. (Amor and Austin, 2003,
p. 136)
Likewise, the use of handcuffs when transporting
or restraining asylum seekers, and the fact that the
process of determining refugee claims views asylum
seekers as guilty until proven innocent (Phillips,
2000), conrms their insertion into criminalised
discourses.
The emotional distancing between detention staff
and asylum seekers which is achieved through
liminality, dehumanising and criminalising practices, effectively strips away the identities of asylum
seekers in exchange for an objectied prisoner
identity: a body which is counted, herded, monitored and controlled (Stoller, 2003; Philo, 2001;
Foucault, 1977). Personal vulnerabilities to mental
health problems and/or posttraumatic stress from
previous experiences are signicantly worsened by

261

these oppressive conditions, resulting in the forms

of severe psychological deterioration which have
been well documented in a number of rigorous
studies (Silove, 2003; Koutroulis, 2003; McGorry,
2002; Sultan and OSullivan, 2001; Phillips, 2000).
Ultimately, the embodiment and daily practice of
dehumanising and criminalising practices undermine and transform fundamental attributes of what
it means to be a person.
Resisting the anti-place
Pugliese (2002, p. 2) argues that it is this violence
of imprisonment in-innitude that is surely the
locus of madness and the despair that generates the
uprising and revolts in the detention centres.
Despite the play of power in detention centres,
asylum seekers are not simply docile bodies as in
Foucaults analysis of disciplinary power (Foucault,
1977, pp. 138139), but resist the forces that oppress
them. In fact, resistance to the conditions of
detention becomes a major way through which
asylum seekers negotiate and deal with their
experiences of the IDC. Rather than culturally
alien plays at attention seeking, the popularly
publicised suicide attempts, acts of protest (including mass hunger strikes and lip sewing), attempted
escapes, and violence within detention centres are
an embodied revolt against detention structures and
practices. This is not to romanticise resistance or
violence, but to bring the focus back to the body,
and its central importance as an embodied site of
resistance.
Such embodied resistance has been documented
from a clinical perspective. Sultan and OSullivan
(2001), for example, paint a disturbing picture of the
psychological impact wrought by the progressive
loss of modes of expression and resistance over time
as asylum seekers come to negotiate the corrosive
conditions of long-term detention. Through his
observations and interactions with compatriot
detained asylum seekers, Sultan was able to describe
what he saw as four stages in mental state,
depressive symptoms and morale over the detention
period, coinciding with key stages in the process of
determining asylum seekers refugee claims.
Following an initial period of shock and disbelief
at being detained, a rejection at the primary stage of
the determination process would for most asylum
seekers coincide with the development of a primary
depressive stage (Sultan and OSullivan, 2001).
This stage was marked by symptoms of clinical

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P. McLoughlin, M. Warin / Health & Place 14 (2008) 254264

depression, the return of PTSD symptoms in

vulnerable individuals, a growing sense of injustice
and uncertainty, and what Sultan labelled a
primary revolt stage of protest, anger or advocacy
(Sultan and OSullivan, 2001).
Transition to a secondary stage of depression
usually occurred within 618 months of detention,
following a rejection from the Refugee Review
Tribunal (a crucial one-off appeal stage in the
determination process). The secondary depressive
stage was marked by an increase in the severity of
depression; acts of self-harm, including hunger
strikes, cutting, lip-sewing and even suicide attempts; pervasive anxiety about the future; social
withdrawal and isolation; feelings of anger and rage,
and a more passive stage of revolt and resistance to
authority (Sultan and OSullivan, 2001). Sultan also
observed a smaller number of detained asylum
seekers who went on to experience a more severe
state of mental distress, which he characterised as
the tertiary depressive stage. This stage was
distinguished from the secondary stage by the
intensity of feelings of hopelessness, despair and
anxiety, and by a growing sense of rage, distrust and
paranoia directed at authority gures and the
government (Sultan and OSullivan, 2001). Acts of
self-harm and self-mutilation also became more
frequent during this stage. Some asylum seekers
went on to develop psychotic symptoms, including
delusions of persecution, auditory hallucinations,
dissociation and profound social withdrawal (Sultan and OSullivan, 2001).
Moving away from such clinical understandings,
these descriptions of revolt, protest and self-harm
can be understood as a political and embodied
expression of resistance to the panoptic, alienating
system of control at work within the IDC as antiplace. In the absence of any other means of
resistance, asylum seekers are forced to use their
bodies as symbolic instruments of revolt. Bourdieu
(1991), in his analysis of symbolic power, argues
that people in subordinate positions (such as asylum
seekers in detention) participate in subjection in
order to neutralise its effects. Stripped of alternative
means of protest, asylum seekers use their bodies in
such symbolically potent gestures to give voice to
their anxiety. Silove (2003), Koutroulis (2003) and
Turner (2002) have similarly argued that these
protests are bodily expressions of a desperate hope
for freedom and control which is progressively
eroded throughout the detention period, and which
has been exacerbated for many by experiences of

persecution and oppression prior to seeking asylum

in Australia.
The use of punitive measures by detention centre
staff to contain and control these acts of resistance
only adds to the trauma of asylum seekers.
Examples of punitive responses to mental distress
abound. HREOC Inquiries and accounts by Koutroulis (2003) and Sultan and OSullivan (2001)
have, for example, revealed the use of observation
rooms6 as a form of solitary connement and
surveillance for asylum seekers who have engaged in
acts of self-harm and/or protest. The use of threats
by detention staff to subdue protestors is also
common, and in their attempts to curb protests,
detention centre staff have reafrmed the panopticism structure of detention by threatening asylum
seekers with the fear of constant watching and
recording, and that any action may be used against
them in the refugee determination process.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have drawn from the work of
Foucault, Casey and the anthropologies of space
and place to argue that place is not marginal to
mental health, but that marginality can increase
mental health issues. In particular, we have highlighted the pivotal role that detention locations,
architecture and practices play in the rising incidence of poor mental health for Australias
asylum seekers. The very positioning of detention
centres in marginalised and often uninhabitable
Australian lands creates a profound sense of
isolation. The physical structures are similarly
alienating in their prison like architecture, where
the iron gates and barbed wire speak of danger and
connement. Like Silove and other commentators,
we argue that these physical environments are
central to the increasing incidence of mental health
issues amongst asylum seekers.
However, in using Foucauldian ideas of surveillance and Caseys anti-place, we move beyond
current understandings that envisage a cause and
effect model between physical structures (spaces)
and mental health. Surveillance and anti-place allow
us to examine the ways in which spaces are
6
As Koutroulis (2003) comments, the Federal Government
denies the ofcial existence of cells in detention centres.
Observation room is a euphemistic title for a cell-like solitary
connement space in detention centres such as Woomera and
Baxter.

ARTICLE IN PRESS
P. McLoughlin, M. Warin / Health & Place 14 (2008) 254264

embodied, and how bodies experience the uncertain

spatio-temporal dimensions of detention, such as
continual monitoring and liminality. Low and
Lawrence-Zuniga, in their anthropological approach to space and place, argue that spatial
analyses often neglect the body because of difculties in resolving the dualism of the subjective and
objective body, and distinctions between the material and representational aspects of body space
(Low and Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003, p. 2). Rather
than separate mind and bodies, we have used the
concept of embodied space to underscore the ways
in which detention environments not only physically
restrain asylum seekers, but become embodied,
practiced and resisted in everyday lives. It is the
intense management and administration of everyday lives, coupled with the experiences of stretched
out, liminal spaces, that leads to embodied distress.
The distress of detained asylum seekers cannot be
readily explained away by the trauma they may
have experienced during earlier struggles with
persecution or displacement alone. Steel et al.
(2004, p. 534) report a three-fold increase in
psychiatric disorders for adults subsequent to
detention (and an alarming ten-fold increase for
children). These authors also highlight that such
prevalence rates were substantially higher than
those found in general refugee populations, including children, who had not been in detention. What is
most disturbingly about this evidence, and what has
already been pointed out in this paper (yet seems to
be overlooked in public discourses), is that 85% of
all asylum seekers are found to be legitimate
refugees and are able to stay in Australia.
Despite this evidence, the dehumanising and
criminalising practices of Australias immigration
detention centres continue to be upheld. A recent
article by Fazel and Silove (2006, p. 251) in the
British Medical Journal states that Australia has
given up mandatory detention because it damages
detainees mental health. This is not the case. In
2005, and bowing to public pressure (including
opposition from within their own Government) and
a series of high prole and damaging detention
mistakes,7 the Australian Federal Government
introduced what they termed a softer edge to
7

In 2005, it came to light that Australian permanent resident

(Cornelia Rau, who suffers from schizophrenia) was mistakenly
taken for an illegal immigrant and had been locked up in the
Baxter Detention Centre for ten months. The Federal Inquiry
into this case (the Palmer Inquiry, 2005) was highly critical of
detention centres and the inadequacies of mental health care.

263

mandatory detention. This includes releasing families with children into community detention,
introduction of time limits on claim assessment,
the promise of better conditions within centres, and
greater efciency in the granting of temporary
protection visas. The Federal Government has not
changed the law or policy framework on mandatory
detention, but made some concessions whilst
simultaneously continuing to expand off-shore
processing. As long as the inhumane design of
Australias detention policy maintains its hold over
the political and social landscape, it stands to
harbour profoundly troubling implications for the
future welfare and wellbeing of some of the worlds
most marginalised people. These potentially damaging effects of prolonged detention stand as a stark
warning to other countries (like the UK) who seem
to be pursuing Australias policy of detention.

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