ABSTRACT
This chapter presents evidence that understanding the health of migrants may be facilitated by taking a life-course approach. A life-course approach enables a temporal perspective of how resilience may operate. In epidemiology, the life-course approach aims to identify the underlying biological, behavioural, and psychosocial processes that operate across the lifespan. A life-course approach to migrant health enriches the understanding of disease aetiology. Stories told by refugees may be very hard to listen to, but they provide some access to the way they understand health and illness and the values nested within the wider narratives of their society and culture. Experiences of torture and trauma mean that refugees may fear people in authority, the police, and sometimes health professionals because they may have been part of the regime that persecuted them. A cohort study in China found that worse self-reported health was associated with both a reduced likelihood of internal migration and predicted returning home.
