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This article examines the psychological effects of immigration, highlighting challenges faced before, during, and after migration. In addition to coping methods like family support, the article emphasizes the importance of culturally sensitive mental health care for immigrants and refugees.
Echoes of Exile: Understanding and Healing Immigrant Trauma
One kind of mental anguish that can arise before, during, and after migration is known as immigration trauma. Understanding acculturation challenges is essential to comprehending immigrant trauma. However, what precisely is it? It is "the dynamic process immigrants go through to adjust to their new nation." There can be several acculturation challenges, and it can be a very traumatic process for many immigrants, but it can also happen quickly and easily for individuals. Linguistic challenges, financial difficulties, shifting gender norms, and a decline in social mobility in their adoptive country are some of the factors that could be causing them stress.
But before moving ahead, how do we define "trauma"? According to the American Psychological Association, trauma can be defined as "any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person's attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning. Traumatic events include those caused by human behavior (e.g., rape, war, industrial accidents) as well as by nature (e.g., earthquakes) and often create a psychological impact and challenge an individual's view of the world as a just, safe, and predictable place."
Immigration trauma can be visualized in different stages. These stages are:
Pre-migration trauma: Before moving, some people may have gone through trauma; this trauma would have probably affected their decision to leave their nation. This could entail armed conflict, poverty, violence, or persecution.
The Migration: This entails experiencing trauma while traveling. This could entail forced labor, violence, confinement, or a lack of access to essential services.
Post-migration trauma: In addition to financial difficulties and subpar living conditions, immigrants and refugees may suffer trauma due to obstacles to receiving fundamental services like healthcare and education, especially if they are sending money to family members back home.
These stages may be combined with a variety of factors that can lead to the manifestation of trauma in immigrants. Some of these factors are:
Integration and settlement: Trauma might result from difficulties in integrating and settling. A host culture that tolerates prejudice, exclusion, isolation, and discrimination, as well as subpar living and working conditions, may make it difficult for immigrants to integrate and build resilience.
Loss of familiarity and identity: A type of grief known as "cultural bereavement" can result from migration stress. It occurs when someone relocates to a new society and loses their familiar culture and social structure. Migrants may miss the language of their home country, as well as social networks and support systems.
Lack of stability and uncertainty: Particularly in terms of post-migration stress, depression and ambiguity over immigration policy can lead to anxiety and trauma—some migrants may struggle to obtain work permits or fear deportation.
Assault, brutality, and a loved one's loss: In addition to losing family members or friends, migrants and refugees may have been the victims of assault, abuse, or violence before, during, or after their journey—experiences that, in any case, would be painful for most people and have a substantial psychological impact on them, regardless of the larger migratory context.
Insufficient resources or tools to adapt to a new environment: This may result from their inability to communicate in their native tongue, financial situation, or lack of knowledge of the options.
How can one deal with immigrant trauma?
Migrants' trauma and stress can be mitigated by reuniting with family, learning the language of the new nation, and having access to work, basic amenities, and social support. Various strategies have been outlined by the World Health Organization to address the mental health needs of migrants and refugees.
These include reaching out to at-risk groups, including unaccompanied adolescents and immigrants who identify as LGBTQ+, as well as providing information on mental health care access through educational institutions, places of worship, and community outreach programs. Integrating mental health care through social services, education, and law enforcement is crucial, as is person-centered care that respects cultural and religious distinctions.
In the end, acculturative stress can be mitigated by realizing that national identification and ethnic identity—which include legacy culture and racial identity—do not conflict and can live together. Long-term assistance, community spaces, mental health services, proper documentation, and secure housing are necessary for refugees and migrants. It will significantly assist them in building resilience, even though it won't altogether remove the trauma.
Author: Tanveer Saini
Edited By: Sadaf Iqbal