Developmental Contexts and Mental Disorders Among Asian Americans

Abstract

In this article, we use age of immigration as a proxy for the developmental context for understanding the association between immigration experiences and mental health. Generation defines the context under which immigrants arrive in the United States. We drew data from the National Latino and Asian American Study (N = 2,095), the first ever study conducted on the mental health of a national sample of Asian Americans. Our findings reveal that age of immigration is linked to lifetime and 12-month rates of psychiatric disorder: Immigrants who arrive earlier in life are more likely to have both lifetime and 12-month disorders. U.S. born and immigrants who arrive as children are much more likely to have a mental disorder in their lifetimes than other immigrant generations.