Mexican Immigrants to U.S. More Likely to Have Psychiatric Disorders than Mexican or U.S. Populations
CNSNews.com) – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is paying researchers more than $450,000 in federal tax money to further investigate the relationship between emigration from Mexico and psychiatric disorders.
A previous study of English-speaking Mexican immigrants found that, irrespective of legal status, immigrants with a “pre-existing disorder" were three times more likely to migrate to the U.S. than those who did not.
That 2006 report – “Mental Disorders Among English-Speaking Mexican Immigrants to the U.S. Compared to a National Sample of Mexicans†-- focused on mood and anxiety disorders that are listed in the official Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association.
The authors of the 2006 study, led by psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Breslau of University of California-Davis School of Medicine, used survey data to compare immigrants before and after they came to the U.S.
They discovered that not only did experiences with migration seem to lead to a risk for psychiatric disorders, but also that Mexican immigrants began with a higher risk of mental problems than the general population to begin with.
Well, that explains LULAC.
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