Treatment for Psychosomatic Blindness Among Cambodian Refugee Women

Counseling Adult Women Rape Survivors:

“…These concerns have been widely described among Latina survivors and their families (Contreras & Mendez, 1978;Fontes, 1993aFontes, , 1993bLefley et al, 1993;Williams & Holmes, 1982). Similar concerns have been described among Southeast Asian survivors (Kanuha, 1987;Mollica & Son, 1989;Van Boemel & Rozee, 1992).…”

Caregiver and Elder Experiences of Cambodian, Vietnamese, Soviet Jewish, and Ukrainian Refugees

“…The most successful services incorporated community-based approaches to outreach (Sloane, 1991;Southeast Asian Health Project, 1991). Other success factors included family and indigenous social supports (Browne & Broderick, 1994), commitment to learning English as a second language (Grognet, 1989), formation of small groups focusing on psychological strengths (Faust & Lipson, 1992), and training in living skills and traditional health practices (Van Boemel & Rozee, 1992). Aroian (1999) has linked use of health and social services by Russian immigrants to the availability and competition among providers in areas where large numbers of immigrants are concentrated.…”

Sense and Subjectivity

“…Van Boemel and Rozée write, for instance, of the women's need for talk therapy (to heal national and cultural wounds caused by Cambodian histories of violence) and "skills" courses to aid in their ability to "participate in American society" and for "adjustment to living in the United States" (to rehabilitate through assimilation and recruitment into the national narrative). 40 Though treatment is pursued out of compassion, the outcomes remain consistent with a less charitable view of the disciplining regimes of the medico-juridical complex, continuing to narrate the need for institutional intervention and correction in the lives of these women. Robert McRuer notes that "people of color, from one perspective, were not the ideal subjects for hegemonic processes of either twentieth-century rehabilitation or social engineering [because of racism, they aren't integrated, but segregated].…”

“…Van Boemel and Rozée find a correlation between the women's " 'acculturation' problems" "related to living in a 'foreign' country, i.e., the United States," and visual acuity. 42 Here, being outside cultural citizenship becomes consonant with a need for rehabilitation and a need to inhabit institutional spaces. 43 The pathologizing narratives of rehabilitation created through institutionalization simultaneously hail the tropes and processes of citizenship and signal the women as particularly external to narratives of normative citizenship.…”