Acculturation: Stress and Depression in Latinos
Acculturative stress refers to the psychological toll of adjusting to a new culture. For Hispanics arriving in the United States, the stressors tend to run deep, stay intense, and last a lifetime. The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services noted in 2001 that the Latino population was expanding quickly, with projections suggesting that by 2050 close to a quarter of the country's population would be Latino. Given that steady climb, counselors have good reason to keep learning about the particular pressures facing Hispanic teenagers and to help those teens find their footing.
Stress theory offers a useful frame here. When a person reads a situation as threatening, or as something past their ability to manage, that appraisal itself produces stress and can open the door to negative emotions such as depression. Pressure to assimilate, a shortage of intercultural skills, and experiences of discrimination all qualify. If a teen perceives any of these as larger than what they can cope with, the result can be a felt sense of stress and, from there, depression.
A study at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis points to acculturative stress as part of the reason Indiana's Latino youth show a troubling gap in depression and suicide compared with white children their age. Epidemiological data on health disparities put the rate of suicide attempts among Latino teens in Indiana at 65 percent higher than white teens, and depression at 24 percent higher. Part of what feeds this is the split second generation teens live with: they are expected to behave one way at home while the surrounding culture pulls in another direction. Friction with parents over what they do and how they should carry themselves piles onto the usual strain of adolescence.
The researchers looked at the link between acculturative stress and depression in 86 Latino adolescents aged 12 to 19. The community-based participatory design included 41 males and 45 females, and nearly 60 percent of them turned out to have some degree of depression. Teens reporting moderate acculturative stress were ten times as likely to be depressed. Those who scored low on self-mastery and said they struggled to get past obstacles were six times as likely to carry that acculturative stress in the first place.
Katrina Conrad, community research and outreach coordinator at the school, said the numbers stopped her. "When we saw the alarming disparity in suicide attempts and depression rates, we had to ask what could be going on." Working with community partner Virna Diaz, who directs the Latino Health Organization, and backed by funding from the Indiana Minority Health Coalition, the team built a yearlong program aimed at raising self-mastery and resilience. They called it "Your Life. Your Story: Latino Youth Summit."
It opened in June with a summer camp. The design pairs a resilience-building curriculum with mentoring from university undergraduates, plus physical activity and creative outlets: art, music, storytelling, technology, dance. Teens gather monthly for activities meant to give them room to shape their identities, strengthen their sense of self, and put their own stories into words. One week into camp the early signs looked good. Participants showed a statistically significant rise in resilience alongside a statistically significant drop in depressive symptoms. The hope is that those lines hold their direction through the full year.
Classic stress-and-coping theory treats coping as central to how stress translates into adjustment. Coping covers the mental and behavioral work a person does to handle a situation they judge as taxing or beyond their resources. Building resilience, which is another way of saying building the capacity to cope, cuts directly into the stress. Coping functions as a regulatory process that can soften the negative feelings a stressful event leaves behind. Active coping, where a person tackles the problem through thought or action, tends to blunt the damage; avoidant coping, where the problem gets ignored or buried, tends to work far less well. Putting these students inside a program like this one has them actively practicing coping and strengthening resilience, which lowers the odds of depression, stress, and even social anxiety.
"The 'Your Life. Your Story.' program has the potential to create a large and lasting impact, not only in Indianapolis, but across Indiana and even nationwide," Conrad said. "We think it is something that could be tailored to other types of underserved or marginalized youth as well, and we hope to expand it."
The acculturation process carries a markedly higher risk of depression for Hispanic men and women. Confronting that process head-on, through programs built for it and through personal support systems, does far more to bring depression down than leaving the problem untouched.
- Laura A. Wells