Impact of new country, discrimination, and acculturation-related factors on depression and anxiety among ex-Soviet Jewish migrants: data from a population-based cross-national comparison study

Abstract

Migration, displacement, and flight are major worldwide phenomena and typically pose challenges to mental health. Therefore, migrants’ mental health, and the factors which may predict it, have become an important research subject. The present population-based cross-national comparison study explores symptoms of depression, anxiety, and somatization, as well as quality-of-life in samples of ex-Soviet Jewish migrants settling in three new countries: Germany, Austria and Israel, as well as in a sample of non-migrant ex-Soviet Jews in their country of origin, Russia. In the current study, we investigate the relationship of perceived xenophobiа and antisemitism, acculturation attitudes, ethnic and national identity, as well as affiliation with Jewish religion and culture to the psychological well-being of these migrants. Furthermore, we consider xenophobic and antisemitic attitudes as well as the acculturation orientation of the new countries’ societies, assessed in the native control samples. Our data suggest that attitudes of the new country’s society matter for the mental health of this migrant group. We conclude that the level of distress among ex-Soviet Jewish migrants seems to depend, among other factors, on the characteristics of the new country and/or specific interactions of the migrant population with the society they are settling in.

Keywords:

• Mental health
• immigrants
• new country effect
• discrimination

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully thank Andreas Pähler for editing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the present article, we chose to use the term “new” country instead of the more common terms “host” or “receiving” countries to avoid the association with host–parasite relationship with a possible connotation of migrant inferiority or host–guest relationship, in which case it is expected that migrants may go back.

Additional information

Funding

The first author was supported by a PhD scholarship from the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk.