Mental Health: A Crisis in Little Bangladesh
Originally published in The Local. Read the full text here.
In August of 2016, at the end of a long, dark period in Ahmed Haider’s life, his niece from Bangladesh visited him in Toronto. Haider and his wife, Hosne Afroz, took their guest on a grand tour of southern Ontario: Niagara Falls, the CN Tower, the Woodbine Racetrack. They also drove past the Lowe’s store where Haider had an evening job in the greenhouse. His oldest of two sons, aged six, pointed excitedly from the backseat: “Look, my dad’s a gardener.”
That evening, Afroz was inconsolable. “Your son will never know you’re a doctor,” she said, weeping. “You’re losing your identity.” Haider tried to reassure her. “I have many identities,” he said. “I’m a human being. I’m a father.” But he shared her despair. He hadn’t donned a stethoscope since arriving in Canada in 2012 and wondered if he ever would again.
When Haider emigrated from Dhaka, he was 33. He’s pushing 40 now but looks younger — a long-bearded, soft-spoken man with an ingenuous smile. Afroz, whom Haider describes as “brilliant,” is also a doctor, earning her degree at one of the country’s most prestigious schools, the Sir Salimullah Medical College in Dhaka. In 2012, the couple got their Canadian immigration papers through the Express System program — commonly referred to as the “points system” — which offers expedited visas to people like them: healthy, credentialed, and not too far into their working years. The points system holds out a special promise for immigrants. Surely, any country that so heavily emphasises professional skills must also be one in which newcomers can land good jobs.
The couple and their two young sons settled near Victoria Park Station, in a community sometimes called Little Bangladesh. The area straddles two neighbourhoods of the east sub-region, Oakridge and Taylor-Massey (formerly Crescent Town), and has sizable migrant populations from India, Pakistan, and other South Asian countries. At its centre is a suite of concrete high rises built in the postwar tower-in-a-park style. There’s ample green space, in which one sees picnics and cricket matches on weekends. The towers have prayer rooms oriented toward Mecca, and there’s halal meat for sale at the local grocery stores.
Haider’s first two years in Canada were promising, at least professionally. In fall 2013, with money from home, he enrolled at the Mennonite New Life Centre in a bridge training program, which acquaints newly arrived doctors with Canadian health-care protocols. Although not a licensed physician in Canada, he began working as a counsellor at Mennonite. Thanks to a partnership with his local Bangladesh Centre and Community Services agency, he also worked one day per week in his neighbourhood.
The job put him in the centre of a community reeling from a mental-health crisis. Out of the city’s 72 neighbourhoods, Taylor-Massey has the highest rate of mental-health visits per year; Oakridge isn’t far behind. Haider believes that residents’ inability to find work in their fields is a leading contributor to these ailments. The research bears him out. In a forthcoming York University study on the Bangladeshi community, numerous participants reported that “lack of job security, precarious employment, and lack of meaningful employment upon arrival were the greatest source of stress and frustration in a new immigrant’s life.”
To understand the relationship between employment and mental health, one must appreciate both the importance of work in South Asian cultures and the ways in which work impacts every other facet of a person’s life. As a counsellor, Haider witnessed these dynamics. Then he lost his job, and the problems of the community became his problems too.
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.