Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the issue of migrants’ access to health focussing on the specific case of refugees within the Italian scene. The analysis will take into account the limits of the Italian Health System in taking in charge refugees’ psychological vulnerabilities.

Paper long abstract:

As the word itself suggests, the refugee is someone looking for a shelter, for protection from experienced violence and abuses. Usually refugees escape wars, ethnic conflicts, political oppression, and any other kind of personal discrimination. The violence and tortures experienced produce physical and psychological frailties, affecting refugees' abilities to undertake even the simpliest daily activity. The Italian Reception System for asylum seekers and refugees (SPRAR), promoted by the Ministry of Interior, recognizes such a condition of vulnerability, and disposes that those with serious psychological fragilities are hosted in specific reception centres offering adequate healthy services. However there are two main critical aspects of such a model:

1.The early diagnosis of possible mental disorders in a refugee is very hard to fullfil, mostly because before entering into the SPRAR centres, migrants transit into huge governative camps, where a very shallow health screening is carried out. Therefore often migrants are allocated to "ordinary" SPRAR reception centres, and their vulnerabilities emerge once people are already entered into an unsuitable place;

2.Refugees are hosted into the SPRAR centres only for six month, exstensible only to other six months. After this period, people should be able to take care of themselves, and live autonomously as any other Italian citizen. However the access to public services for pshycological and psychiatric support is harduous, and often the staff is not prepared to work with this kind of patients.

The paper will develop the analysys of the issue, presenting an ethnography carried out within the SPRAR reception centres.