Where is home? Mapping the mental health impacts of the Windrush Scandal

Date: 6 October 2022 Time: 1-2pm About the lecture: Between 1948 and 1973, around 500,000 people arrived in the UK from Caribbean countries, answering the call for workers to take jobs in the newly-formed NHS and other sectors affected by Britain’s post-war labour shortage. In 2017, news began to surface that hundreds of Commonwealth citizens of the ‘Windrush generation’ had been wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights. They endured lost employment, housing and livelihoods, and were forcibly separated from their families. Dr Rochelle Burgess is now leading The Ties That Bind, the first study to map the mental health impacts of the Windrush scandal on those directly affected and their wider families. Over the course of six months, the project will record the experiences of those affected and document evidence that he team hopes will improve awareness of the ongoing traumas caused by the scandal and motivate policy action around mental health support for victims, families and communities. The absence of attention to the mental health needs of Windrush scandal survivors and their families is a huge gap that must be addressed. This project takes initial steps to raising awareness and discussion of the importance of these issues. In this lecture, Dr Burgess will give an insight into the experiences of Windrush communities and the work of the study. About the speaker: Dr Rochelle Burgess, Associate Professor in Global Health and Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Global Non-Communicable Diseases, at the Institute for Global Health at UCL.