Long-term mental health outcome of returning migrant children and adolescents

Abstract

 We examined how remigration influences the prevalence of psychiatric symptoms among children and adolescents in the long term. We investigated depressive and behavioral symptoms in 320 Finnish children and adolescents who moved back from Sweden while of school-age during the years 1984–1985 and in a series of controls. The data were gathered in two phases, with questionnaires sent to the parents, children and teachers in 1986, and with further questionnaires sent to the parents and children in 1992. Depression was measured by means of the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI) (8) and behavioral symptoms with the Children’s Behavioral Questionnaire, filled in by the teachers (14) in the first phase and by the parents (15) in the second. We compared prevalence of these psychiatric symptoms between the migrants and controls in groups divided by age and sex in the two phases and examined how depressiveness or behavioral disturbance shortly after migration served to predict later psychiatric symptoms. The following findings emerged: The boys who moved before puberty had more psychiatric symptoms than their controls in both phases, while the best-adapted group consisted of the girls who moved before puberty. Those migrant children who moved during puberty had more psychiatric symptoms than their controls only in the second phase. The depressive features and behavioral disturbances observed among the migrants during the first phase did not lead to disturbances in the second phase, whereas an association was found between psychiatric disturbances among the native controls in the first and second phases.