Mental health of expatriates negatively affected by incidents occurring in home countries
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NEW ORLEANS — Higher levels of depression, anxiety and PTSD were reported by Lebanese expatriates following explosions in Beirut in 2020, according to a speaker at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.
“On Aug. 4, 2020, one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in history occurred in Beirut, Lebanon. It left hundreds of people homeless killed and injured. I witnessed it firsthand,” Gaëlle Rached, MD, Msc, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said during an association-sponsored press conference. “My co-authors were not there. They were [expatriates] at the time, and I felt very emotional hearing about their experience as expatriates of the blast. They heard about the blasts from social media, and they tried reaching out to their families, but they weren't able to reach them. They spent hours trying to reach them, imagining the worst.”
According to Rached, expatriates are already under stressful conditions living abroad with no known social support. Rached said this, along with not much being known about the mental health of expatriates, was the reason she and her colleagues decided to investigate the repercussions of the explosion.
“In a disaster, the tension naturally goes towards the most immediate victims, people who are impacted physically, and with physical injuries and damages,” she said. “However, [expatriates] still had a home in Lebanon, still had family there, and they, too, are impacted.”
Rached and colleagues began recruiting survey participants 7 months after the blasts occurred and continued for the duration of 7 months. A total of 1,117 people enrolled in the survey, but 447 were not included for either not being Lebanese or not being an expatriate.
Of 670 eligible participants (mean age, 31 years), 268 personally experienced the blasts firsthand when visiting Lebanon. All 670 participants took the Hopkins Symptom Checklist, which assesses depression and anxiety symptoms. Those who personally experienced the blasts were scored on the DSM-5 scale for presenting PTSD-like symptoms.
In total, 41.2% of participants experienced depression or anxiety symptoms following the blasts. Of those who personally witnessed the event, 57.5% experienced PTSD-type symptoms. Furthermore, negative effects were reported more in younger participants and women.
“The mental health of expatriates is negatively affected by traumatic incidents happening in their home countries, even months after the event occurred, no matter how long they have been away from their own country, and more so if they are female or younger,” Rached said.