Mental Health in Immigrant Communities

Moving to a new country can be a very mentally and physically exhausting endeavor. Many immigrants go to places where they don’t know anybody and, in many cases, don’t even speak the nation’s language. While the motive behind immigration to a new country is to essentially seek a better life, it’s not without trauma in some way.

Immigrants deal with a lot of fears even after settling into their new homes. Most immigrants tend to reside in or close to immigrant communities that consist of their countrymen and even other immigrants from different parts of the world. For example, Chinese immigrants live close to Chinatowns or districts that are predominantly Asian cultured. When immigrant first arrive, these communities are a slice of home.

How does immigration affect new settlers?
Whether legal or illegal, immigrants face a lot of mental challenges. Some of the most common issues that they face are:

Acculturation
Acculturation is basically how persons adjust to the exposure and contact of another culture, typically the most dominant one. When immigrants land in the US, it can be a major shift for some. They are faced with adapting to new rules, laws and customs that they are not familiar with while maintaining their own cultural identity. This can be taxing on some as they are faced with fears of not being accepted or discriminated against due to stereotypes. Stress, anxiety and depression can be the outcome of acculturation.

Traumatic Experiences
Illegal and legal immigrants are often faced with traumatic experiences such as family separation. For legal immigrants, they may have left family behind in their home country in order to secure basic needs prior to reunion. For illegal immigrants, perhaps their family became separated at point of entry. There is more risk associated with illegal immigration which include, exposure to violence, sexual and physical harm, human trafficking as well as detention by authorities. These experiences can lead to PTSD in immigrants. For undocumented immigrants, they are hypervigilant and live with daily fear of being found and detained.

Lack of Social Support
Lack of social and family support can be frustrating. Immigrants may turn to substance abuse to cope. It may also create feelings of low self-esteem, anger and depression. Domestic violence and other dysfunctional behavior may also come about due to this. Lack of financial stability, problems with acculturation, tensions within the family unit and lack of community belonging can greatly affect the mental well-being of immigrants.

How Children are Affected
Depending on the age of the child at the time of migration, they too can be faced with issues that can affect them mentally. Older children may be at risk of detention and deportation with their parents if they entered undocumented. US born children of immigrants are faced with the possibility of being left behind if parents are detained. The sheer possibility of such events occurring leaves children with constant anxiety, fear and depression. Adapting to school systems can also create stress in cases of bullying, failure to adapt to school settings or low academic performance.

What can be done to alleviate stressors?
Undocumented immigrants have little to no access to proper mental healthcare and support. They also run a huge risk if they tried to seek help due to their illegal status. In immigrant communities, religious bodies take up the mantle of providing counselling and social assistance and support. However, they are not clinically trained to deal with mental disorders and usually advise parishioners to ‘pray their pain away’. While they do try their best to help, for some immigrants it is merely a band aid.

Immigrants who went through the proper legal channels to reside in the US have more access to health care. However, it is costly and many opt out of getting help. Some useful ways to help the situation can be:

• More compassion and acceptance from the communities where immigrants reside
• Public education about immigration and its positive impacts
• Foreign language informational campaigns in immigrant communities to provide immigrants with some assistance in coping with mental stressors, substance abuse help and AA meetings, social clubs and so forth

These simple procedures can assist with social support and assistance which can alleviate some stress factors that immigrants face. While it certainly is not enough, it can open doors to help immigrants with health and mental care.

Resources
https://www.mhanational.org/sites/default/files/1245p2%20Paredes.pdf
https://www.nami.org/Blogs/NAMI-Blog/July-2019/Mental-Health-Challenges-in-Immigrant-Communities
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/why-mental-healthcare-is-not-a-safe-space-for-undocumented-migrants#Ensuring-a-basic-safety-net