Empowering the body : chronic stress, meaning, and narrative among refugees and migrants in Lower Sherbourne, Toronto

Chronic stress is typically portrayed in biomedical literature as a psychologically degenerative condition which also causes physical decline. In public health literature, structural disadvantage, such as poverty, precarious migration status, and systemic racism have also been described as causing chronic stress. Migrants and refugees, therefore, are portrayed as experiencing high levels of chronic stress. This thesis seeks to provide a witness account of migrant and refugees’ experiences with chronic stress, while challenging assumptions that chronic stress is a debilitating condition. Rather, this thesis’s findings illustrate how illness narratives allow stress to be embodied, understood and managed outside biomedical paradigms. Reading response theory is used alongside illness narrative theory to demonstrate how personal narratives during periods of chronic stress generate feelings of empowerment through meaning-making, which can mitigate chronic stress symptoms and phenomenology. Based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Lower Sherbourne region of East Downtown, Toronto, this thesis is based on five in-depth semi-structured interviews and relevant participant observation field notes. Interlocutors were resettled refugees from Syria and Palestine, and migrant international students from Mexico and Colombia. Key findings included that participants did not experience chronic stress as debilitating: Their illness narratives emphasized capability, acceptance, and determination. Meaning making occurred during narration processes using faith, daily living practices, humour, and memory, with chronic stress becoming understood as a feeling to live with, rather than overcome. Overall, it was found that chronic stress does not have a deterministic phenomenology, and that illness narratives can generate embodied feelings of empowerment and calm in face of unsolvable stressors.