The role of cultural psychiatry in improving the policy response to Central America’s unaccompanied minors at the American border: local and global implications

ABSTRACT

Since 2014, children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras unaccompanied by their parents have fled in large numbers to the USA to escape violent crime and social disadvantage. Current mental health policies in the US government’s response can be improved based on guidelines from professional psychiatric and psychological organizations. These guidelines emphasize the importance of immigration and culture, raising questions into how the field of cultural psychiatry can offer conceptual frameworks and methods to research unaccompanied minor migration as a humanitarian problem. This paper conducts a policy analysis by reviewing shortcomings in the US response and explores the potential contributions of cultural psychiatrists in optimizing services to address the needs of these children in the US and their countries of origin.

KEYWORDS:

• cultural psychiatry
• mental health policy
• child and adolescent psychiatry
• Central America

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Neil Krishan Aggarwal is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University.

Pablo Farias is a Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Anne Becker is Maude and Lillian Presley Profesor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Robert Like is Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Francis Lu is Professor Emeritus at University of California Davis.

Nadiya Oryema is a Resident Physician at New York University.

Roberto Lewis-Fernandez is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health [grant number 1 K23 MH102334].