Wall Disease by Jessica Wapner

Author:Jessica Wapner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2020-09-02T17:10:19+00:00

5

Your Life Is Being Stopped Here

The Risk of Depression at the Border

Border walls are sad places. On the Mexican side of Friendship Park, paintings hung above the fence bring some color to the otherwise depressing architecture. La poesía es gente con sueños, reads one of them. “Poetry is people with dreams.” Street musicians liven up the scene, too. But the ocean is just yards away and the sound of its waves is a constant reminder of a freedom unavailable to its human ­witnesses.

An estimated 7.5 million people live in the twenty-four US counties bordering Mexico. High rates of poverty and unemployment pervade these regions. People tend to be less educated and medical care is sparser.1 One reassuring 2017 study in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health found that people living in the southern US borderlands were not more likely to report depression compared with people living elsewhere.2 But another study from that same year found that almost a quarter of the 248 adult undocumented immigrants interviewed by psychologists at Rice University met the criteria for a mental disorder, a much higher rate than the general US population. Major depressive disorder was the most common diagnosis, but rates of panic and anxiety were also high.3 And a report from Imperial County, California, 120 miles east of San Diego, noted that the area was rife with severe risk factors for poor mental health among youth: separation from parents, gang and other violence, fear that they or their parents will be deported, no medical insurance. Children who are recent immigrants face the additional obstacles of learning a new language, adjusting to a new school and new friends, and being teased.

A close look at the borderland counties of Texas reveals a disturbing pattern. About 18 percent of children throughout the state live in high-poverty neighborhoods. According to a 2017 report by the Center for Public Policy Priorities, now known as Every Texan, an independent public policy organization in Texas, that rate climbs to 68 percent in the Rio Grande Valley. Colonias, rural settlements along the border, home to an estimated 340,000 people,4 often lack potable water, sewer systems, electricity, and paved roads. The median household income for Cameron and Hidalgo Counties, both along the border, is just over half of that for other counties in the state. An estimated 30 percent of children are undernourished. Adults in these counties, whether US-born or not, are less likely to hold high school diplomas than the adult population across the rest of the state.5

All of these factors contribute to the impact of living in a border region on children. A huge body of work demonstrates that adversity in childhood has long-lasting effects. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, or ACES, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, linked up to twenty-one million cases of depression with early-life experiences of violence, abuse, neglect, or family trauma.6

Poverty is, as we know, a major risk factor for mental health issues; this connection has been intimated for years. The

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