Migration and young people’s mental health in Canada: A scoping review

Abstract

Background: Young people’s mental health is a public health priority. Given the influences of migration and resettlement on mental health, synthesis of current research with young people from migrant backgrounds can help inform mental health promotion initiatives that account for and are responsive to their needs.

Aims: This article distils the results of a review of published literature on the mental health of adolescent immigrants (ages 10–19) living in Canada.

Method: Scoping review methods were used to define inclusion and exclusion criteria; inform the search strategies; and extract and synthesize key findings.

Results: Fourteen articles met criteria for inclusion. Analysis of the studies indicate diversity in mental health indicators, e.g., mental distress, emotional problems and behavioral problems, as well as a wide range of influences on mental health from age at migration and length of stay to place of residence, income and discrimination.

Conclusions: Findings support the need to account for the array of influences on young people’s mental health in relation to migration and to augment initiatives beyond the level of individual intervention.

• Mental health
• mental illness
• immigrant

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Notes

¹In 2013 alone, over 258 000 people, including immigrants and refugees, became permanent residents of Canada and over 10 300 people filed refugee claims (Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), 2014). Over the past decade, the top three source countries for permanent residents in Canada have been China, India and the Philippines (CIC). The top three countries of citizenship for refugee claimants have been China, Pakistan and Colombia (CIC).

²In this review, the terms ‘migrant’ or ‘migration’ refer to transnational migration via economic and family class migration, government-assisted refugee and refugee claimant channels (http://www.cic.gc.ca/).

³For instance, children growing up in recent immigrant families experience levels of poverty as high as 49.6% compared to 16.4% among children in non-immigrant families (First Call, 2011).

⁴The term visible minority refers to “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour", as defined by Canada’s Employment Equity Act of 1986; these groups include Chinese, South Asian, Black, Arab, West Asian, Filipino, Southeast Asian, Latin American, Japanese and Korean people (Statistics Canada, 2012).

⁵Asterisks (*) were used in some search terms as a wildcard symbol. In Boolean Searching, this functions to make the search more effective by including variations of the term.