AMERICANS

Depression Among Haitian Americans

Depression Among Haitian Americans

Introduction

Refugee and immigrant children have a broad range of needs, including adequate housing, healthcare, food, education, and basic security. As part of their healthcare needs, refugee and immigrant children also require adequate access to mental health services and support programming that can serve as primary and/or secondary prevention of poor psychosocial health outcomes(Ferreira, et al., 2008). These outcomes can consist of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, conduct problems, difficulties relating to adults and/or peers, attention problems, difficulty concentrating, and poor school performance.

Person-Centered Therapy

Person-Centered Therapy conceived by Carl Rogers, this pattern of humanistic treatment agreements with the ways in which persons see themselves attentively other than having a therapist try to understand lifeless thoughts or ideas(Del, et al., 2007). There are numerous distinct constituents and devices utilised in person-centered treatment encompassing hardworking hearing, genuineness, paraphrasing, and more. But the genuine issue is that the purchaser currently has the responses to the difficulties and the job of the therapist is to hear without making any judgements, without giving recommendations, and easily help the purchaser seem acknowledged and realise their own feelings.

Person-centered treatment presents more blame to the purchaser in their own remedy and outlooks humans in a affirmative manner.

People Behaviour

Despite the fact that there is a critical need for mental health services and related programming for refugee and immigrant youth, there are barriers to accessing care that often include language as well as finances(Gluckstein, et al., 2007). For example, immigrant children in Canada have a lower likelihood of mental health/social services utilization compared to non-immigrant children (relative odds of 0.39, p = 0.02).

In addition to the underutilization of mental health services, immigrant and refugee youth have also demonstrated a greater need for mental health services compared to the host population in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.

While the broader body of knowledge on the mental health of refugee and immigrant youth focuses on a range of psychosocial health outcomes, studies of Haitian immigrant and refugee youth have emphasized "externalizing" behaviors, such as substance use, high risk sexual behavior, delinquency, and "deviant behavior", with very little information available on "internalizing" symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, among Haitian youth(Del, et al., 2007).

Examples of Anxiety

A focus on externalizing problems presents a skewed view of Haitian youth and does not address the root causes of such behaviors. Analyzing stressors and "internalizing" symptoms, such as depression and ...