Ours is a family of migrants. We crossed an ocean once for a better life, and in this generation many of us have crossed again — to the United States, to Europe, to wherever the door opened. Migration is in our blood. So is its cost, and about the cost we are usually silent.

The losses nobody counts

When someone migrates, everyone counts what they gained: safety, work, a future. Almost nobody counts what they lost, because the losses are invisible:

• Their competence. Decades of knowing how everything works — how to see a doctor, fight a bill, fix a problem, who to call — become worthless overnight. A capable adult wakes up functionally illiterate in their own life and has to learn everything again, in a second language, while working.
• Their profession, often. Degrees that don’t transfer, careers restarted from zero, experts cleaning offices. The work is honorable; the grief for the career is real.
• Their people. The daily texture of family — dropping by, cooking together, being ten minutes away when something happens — is replaced by video calls and news that always arrives too late. When a parent falls ill or dies back home, the migrant grieves alone, far away, often unable to travel to the funeral.
• Their identity. At home they were somebody — a name, a family, a history. In the new country they are an accent.

Psychologists call this migratory grief: a real, cumulative mourning for a homeland, a status, and a daily life that still exist but can no longer be lived. Unlike a death, it has no funeral, no condolences, and no closure — the loss renews itself every day.

The perfect recipe for depression

Now add the rest of the migrant’s reality: working relentless hours out of necessity, no time for rest or friendship, a body that starts to hurt from the work and the years, and an ocean between them and everyone who ever knew them well. Isolation, chronic exhaustion, accumulated grief, loss of identity — these are not moral failures. They are the textbook risk factors for depression, all present at once.

So when a relative abroad grows distant, short-tempered, or dark — when they say the new country “isn’t for them,” that they have nothing good to tell, that they are tired all the time — do not read it as bitterness or ingratitude. Read it as a person carrying four kinds of grief up a staircase, alone, in a language not their own.

What helps — from both sides of the distance

• If they left and you stayed: call them. Not with news, not with requests, not with things that interest you — with one question: “How are you, really?” Migrants are usually the strong ones everyone leans on, and the last ones anyone checks on. Be the exception, and be it regularly.
• Remember their dead with them. When someone loses a parent while far from home, mark the date. A message on the anniversary tells them the distance did not erase them from the family.
• If the migrant is you: what you are feeling has a name, it is common, and it is treatable. You are not failing at migration; you are experiencing it. Find people from home where you are — one compatriot who understands without explanation is worth ten well-meaning strangers. And if the fog has settled in — the exhaustion, the emptiness, the sense that nothing good is coming — treat it like the illness it may be. Therapy exists in your language, including remotely; in the US, calling or texting 988 works in Spanish too.
• Lower the bar for “success.” You do not have to love the new country, feel grateful on schedule, or perform happiness for anyone. Surviving a transplant is enough. The blooming can come later.

Migration took courage the day you left. Getting help for what it did to you takes the same courage — and you already proved you have it.

If you need help now: in the United States, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — English and Spanish, 24/7). Elsewhere, findahelpline.com lists free, confidential helplines for nearly every country. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.

This article is for general information only and is not medical advice. A qualified health professional can provide proper evaluation and guidance.

0

0