Browsing by Author "Järvensivu, Venla"

The aim of this Bachelor's thesis was to search, what kind of relation between racism and mental health there is to be found in the previous studies conducted in the Nordic countries. It has been shown in the previous research literature, that there is a connection between racism and mental health. In Finland, the research on the topic is scarce. Hence the geographical focus is on the Nordic countries as a whole. The theoretical background is derived from the post-colonial per-spective, where it is necessary to take the colonial history in account, as it has been entangled to all areas of life. My theoretical standpoint is in the intersection of Frantz Fanon's thoughts on co-lonialism's relation to mental health, and Sara Ahmed's phenomenology of whiteness. This thesis was conducted as a narrative literature review. My research material consisted of 11 peer reviewed articles collected from the EBSCOhost-database. I did my analysis using theoreti-cally oriented content analysis, as the theories guided the frame of the analysis. Content analysis worked as tool for categorising the material. I created categories derived from the theoretical perspectives. In addition, I used colour codes and concept map in order for me to understand the relations and exceptions. Racism and mental health were conceptualised in many different ways, but in spite of the inco-herent conclusions, the relation between racism and mental health was clear. The results indicated that experiencing everyday racism was common. This in turn shows that whiteness is intertwined to the roots of our societies. The results suggested that immigrants with Somalian background did perceive more experiences of racism, whereas they reported relatively less mental health re-lated symptoms. This could be explained with the Eurocentrism and colonial history of Western mental health. Derived from the results it could be stated, that the Nordic welfare states are not safe for all, and this has alarming consequences for the wellbeing of non-white people. In order to change this, it is crucial to make structural societal changes and to dismantle the neutrality of whiteness.