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Shock and awe: waking the dead
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‘Paranoia, for the exile, is a pre-requisite of survival’ says Salman Rushdie in the Satanic Verses.1 Mental health is the theme of this issue in which Veling and colleagues2 show a graded relationship between the degree of discrimination experienced by immigrants to The Netherlands and the incidence of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. The authors consider the biological mechanisms that might be involved in adapting or reacting to the experience of immigration—‘a severe cognitive and emotional challenge’—and invoke rat experiments that show that repeated social defeat leads to sensitization of the mesolimbic dopamine system.
For me, Rushdie has the upper hand in explanatory power—a heightened level of alertness to potential threats in immigrant populations (a positive
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