While exposure to traumatic events impacted on participants' mental well-being, post-migration living difficulties had greater salience in predicting mental health outcomes of people from Burmese refugee backgrounds. Reported rates of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms were consistent with a large review of adults across seven western countries. High levels of somatization point to a nuanced expression of distress. Findings have implications for service provision in terms of implementing appropriate interventions to effectively meet the needs of this newly arrived group in Australia.

This paper offers a critical exploration of the concept of resilience, which is largely conceptualised in the literature as an extraordinary atypical personal ability to revert or 'bounce back' to a point of equilibrium despite significant adversity. While resilience has been explored in a range of contexts, there is little recognition of resilience as a social process arising from mundane practices of everyday life and situated in personenvironment interactions. Based on an ethnographic study among single refugee women with children in Brisbane, Australia, the women's stories on navigating everyday tensions and opportunities revealed how resilience was a process operating intersubjectively in the social spaces connecting them to their environment. Far beyond the simplistic binaries of resilience versus non-resilient, we concern ourselves here with the everyday processual, person-environment nature of the concept. We argue that more attention should be paid to day-today pathways through which resilience outcomes are achieved, and that this has important implications for refugee mental health practice frameworks

While Australia is considered a world leader in tobacco control, smoking rates within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population have not declined at the same rate. This failure highlights an obvious shortcoming of mainstream antismoking efforts to effectively understand and engage with the socio-cultural context of Indigenous smoking and smoking cessation experiences. The purpose of this article is to explore the narrative accounts of 20 Indigenous ex-smokers within an urban community and determine the motivators and enablers for successful smoking cessation. Our findings indicated that health risk narratives and the associated social stigma produced through anti-smoking campaigns formed part of a broader apparatus of oppression among Indigenous people, often inspiring resistance and resentment rather than compliance. Instead, a significant life event and supportive relationships were the most useful predictors of successful smoking cessation acting as both a motivator and enabler to behavioural change. Indigenous smoking cessation narratives most commonly involved changing and reordering a person's life and identity and autonomy over this process was the critical building block to reclaiming control over nicotine addiction. Most promisingly, at an individual level, we found the important role that individual health professionals played in encouraging and supporting Indigenous smoking cessation through positive rather than punitive interactions. More broadly, our findings highlighted the central importance of resilience, empowerment and trust within health promotion practice.

Young people from refugee backgrounds face enormous challenges in the settlement process within Australia. They must locate themselves within a new social, cultural, geographic and adult space, yet also try to find security within the spaces of their own families and ethnic communities. Traumas of the past can mix with painful experiences of the present. The stresses on the lives of these young people can be both complex and diverse. This paper explores the nature of the stresses among young people from refugee backgrounds living in Australia. It is based on in-depth interviews with 76 young people from refugee backgrounds now living in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. A qualitative analysis of the impact of these stressors as well as the coping strategies employed are discussed. It is argued that trauma exists within a life continuum and t hat approaches to supporting young people in these circumstances should be wary of limiting their focus to biomedical categories such as PostTraumatic Stress Disorder or Acculturation Stress and instead focus on a wider social context.

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