by Melissa Costa
– USA / Brazil –
They pruned his moments
They impeded his destiny
His boyish smile was hidden many times
But hopes are renewing, like a new dawn each day
And he shall take care of the sprout
In order to give life flowers and fruit.
– Milton Nascimento, A Student’s Heart
I cannot remember how many times I slammed the door as a response to my anger and frustration during my teenage years. I was searching for the answer to the universal question: Who am I? During my adolescence, many of my friends faced the same problems. Some of them took the wrong path; unfortunately, I haven’t heard from them since.
When I first met Rafael, I felt as though I was encountering one of those old friends. But Rafael had a much harsher life. Different from my dear friends, Rafael is an adolescent from a country torn by civil war: Guatemala. Behind Rafael’s gloomy eyes is a hidden story of struggle and suffering.
“There, it was a horrible life, everybody is struggling to survive,” he explains.
Rafael is “uncertainly” 21 years old. “I’m twenty-one, but actually I’m twenty-three. My father didn’t want to let me have a birth certificate, so I was registered a few years after my birth,” he says.
His father left him right after he was born, and when Rafael was eleven years old he moved to the United States with his brother. Like most immigrants, Rafael’s brother was searching for a better life. Their mother was always ill, and they needed to work in order to pay for her medication and expenses in Guatemala.
“My brother wanted me to study and have a better life,” he says.
While his brother was working in construction, Rafael enrolled in Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C.
Unfortunately, the American dream clashed with Rafael’s reality. When he arrived in the United States, he was illiterate in Spanish and didn’t speak English.
“I dropped out of school when I was in the third grade in my country,” Rafael recounts.
Like many other Latino teens, Rafael strived to find his place in American society, but found it extremely difficult to overcome acculturation. He was afraid to face the other Latinos because he didn’t write and read in Spanish. He didn’t connect with them, nor did he integrate with the Americans because he didn’t speak the language and didn’t understand their culture.
After months of struggle, he began to make some improvement. After two years of intensive study, and supported by his teachers, Rafael was able to read and write both in Spanish and English and was awarded a scholarship that allowed him to pay for his college education.
When his brother returned to Guatemala to help his critically ill mother, Rafael felt lonely and lost. His brother left through the same door that depression entered.
“When he left I was 17. He wasn’t here for my high school graduation,” he recalls.
Rafael found himself alone and worried about his mother’s health. As a result, he lost his job, which had supported him through school and helped him pay the bills. Rafael didn’t know and didn’t want to accept that he was facing depression.
“I closed myself off and pushed everyone away from me. I wanted to be alone. I was not seeking help.” Denying his depression led him to a more critical condition, and he attempted suicide.
“It was May. There was no one home, except myself. So I took a lot of pills with alcohol. There was about 50 thousand milligrams of drugs in my system. I mixed up different kinds of medicines. I woke up the next morning feeling weak and sweaty. I was throwing up blood, so I called one of my friends…he took me to the hospital. I stayed for about four months because they had to complete the [treatment] to protect my liver.”
Rafael took the equivalent of one hundred pills of Tylenol, which he washed down with a twelve-pack of beer. The act of trying to take his life was the result of a troubled and lonely reality.
“I had lost my scholarship and school was the most important thing that I really wanted. My mom was about to pass away. I didn’t have a job. I had a girlfriend – we were about to have a baby, but she had a miscarriage [and] dumped me. It all came at once, and I couldn’t handle it.”
When he left the hospital, he was assisted by a psychiatrist through a program for depressed Latino teens. That dramatic experience was an awakening for Rafael, who looked for help and decided to lead a healthy life.
Rafael belongs to a terrifying statistic. According to the US Department for Human Services, Hispanic students (12.8%) were significantly more likely than White, Non-Hispanic or Black Non-Hispanic students (6.7% and 7.3%, respectively) to attempt suicide.
Mental Health professionals have alerted the Latino communities to the increasing numbers of teenagers attempting suicide. Mi Familia’s program offers help to twelve families during a twelve-week session. These families have weekly meetings in Spanish, covering the main problems that affect some Latino families, including domestic violence, alcohol abuse, stress and depression.
“Kids face major changes during their teenager years – stress, confusion, pressure from peers, pressure to succeed and problems in their families,” says Belen Pereira, a mental health therapist who also works for La Clinica del Pueblo in D.C.
Pereira emphasizes that Latino parents usually work second jobs and have little time to spend with their kids. In addition, communication between immigrant parents and their American-born children diverge in cultural differences. Immigrant parents want to raise their children according to their own Latino culture, while kids want to embrace the American culture that surrounds them.
Latino girls suffer the most from this culture clash. According to a 2007 Center for Disease Control and Prevention report, “Hispanic female high school students in grades 9-12 reported a higher percentage of suicide attempts (14.0%) than their White, non-Hispanic (7.7%) or Black counterparts.”
“When the girl goes to school she sees this individualistic society where she can do whatever she wants; she can be whatever she wants to be. Then she goes back home and she has to follow whatever her father is saying. That creates a conflict of cultures. The teenager has a lot of pressure, making the person vulnerable to depression,” says psychiatrist Alvaro Guzman, Deputy Director of Andromeda Transcultural Health in Washington, D.C.
According to Dr. Guzman there are two major problems that Latino teens face in treating depression: a lack of cultural information among psychiatrists and the stigma of mental illness in the Hispanic community.
He acknowledges that some psychiatrists lack an understanding of mentally ill immigrant patients in the United States. He asserts that doctors should be aware of the patient’s culture before diagnosing them. He also attributes the increased number of suicidal Latinos to the inability of Latino culture to accept mental illness, and argues that it is necessary to educate the Latino community towards a better understanding of depression.
“Most Latinos don’t want to go to a psychiatrist. People say ‘you have to get out of this thing by yourself,’” says Dr. Guzman.
Primarily among the less educated, people avoid seeking help from mental health professionals for their kids because they see mental illness as an individual’s failure to deal with his or her own problems. But Ms. Belen Pereira stresses the fact that a suicidal feeling, if not treated, never goes away: “the suicide feeling remains there, it is latent.”
After overcoming his bout with depression, Rafael has dedicated part of his time to encouraging depressed Latino teens to seek professional help. As Dr. Guzman points out, “We need to understand the patient’s culture because 99.99% of human beings are the same; what differs is culture.”
If you or someone you know is suffering from depression and having suicidal thoughts, there are many resources available on the web.
Visit www.suicidehotlines.com for a listing of hotlines in your state. – Ed.
About the Author
Melissa Costa is a Brazilian student of journalism at the University of the District of Columbia, in Washington D.C. In addition to writing for the Brazilian press, Melissa nurtures a passion for literature and has received awards in Brazil for two short stories Lilies from Mansion Number 21 and A Nostalgic Wind.
Thank you, Melissa, for this incredibly important article. Having worked with many first generation and immigrant adolescents, I’ve seen the consequences of culture clash and an education system that rarely provides the necessary services for youth in crisis. As a service provider in Santa Cruz county, I saw a great number of kids who were clearly suffering from depression, but were extremely hard to help. Factors such as the incredible mistrust of their families for the system and their fear of being deported, failure to acknowledge mental health issues and all the challenges of poverty weighed heavily on these children who were caught between two worlds.
Culturally sensitive programs such as Mi Familia, La Clinica del Pueblo and Andromeda Transcultural Health are desperately needed across this country, and not just for the Latino population. Many of the girls who I worked with in San Diego who were immigrants from Somalia suffered great humiliation simply because they did not have underwear and could not attend school when they were menstruating. Their truancy was treated as a grave offense until someone finally took the time to ask why they were absent. Internalized shame from a system that doesn’t cope with the changing faces of its students only perpetuates the problem and ultimately criminalizes behavior that could easily be remedied with social service outreach.
As the United States continues to become more diverse, an investment in services is not only crucial to the health and well-being of the children caught in the middle, but essential for all of us. Our communities are only as healthy as those in the highest of risk groups. As Kate so eloquently said at our recent event, “Agents of Change” in New York City, “I feel tremendous hope for a sustainable future where peace is the objective and the wellbeing of our children is the measure of our greatness.”
The fact that Rafael is Indigenous is not mentioned at all. The value of speaking his first language, most likely unwritten, is not addressed. As one who has spent many years doing all i can to support Indigenous Grandmothers of Dine (Navajo) tribe in Arizona maintain their ancient ways, i have learned how acculturation harms people. Too few “educated” people honor and support traditional cultures that are still facing genocide. Among Native Americans in the US, the suicide rate is the highest among those forcibly relocated from the ancestral lands. Guatemala suffered genocide and still communities that speak out against the massacres of the 60’s trhu the 90’s are killed. No wonder Rafael suffered! His mother’s illness is not the only part of this story. The term “Latin” is of European extraction which denies the Indigenous blood so many people carry who migrate north to the US. By calling them Latin, another level of silencing occurs. Any people working for human rights and justice should be required to have dismantling racism training. We need to be sensitized to the scope of what is possible. Tho Somali culture is extremely patriarchal and women suffer excision, the good from their culture should be valued along with the stand for basic rights of women, girls and all people who suffer from the myriad facets of oppression. Our approach to solution should be comprehensive rather than narrow.
Thanks so much for this piece and attention to the alienation young people endure that all too often leads them to death. Assimilation is not the only approach.
Peace, swaneagle
Melissa, I was deeply humbled by your article. Having grown up in Arizona, I was surrounded by many students that we called “Hispanic”; in all honesty, I never got to know them or their personal stories, and may have assumed incorrectly that they even spoke Spanish (as opposed to an indigenous language, as Swaneagle suggests above). What I did notice is that it was extremely rare for any student with a remotely Hispanic-sounding name to be in an honors class. How could this be, I wondered. Surely it was not true that an entire demographic at my school was intellectually inferior. So, like many, I assumed it was laziness. The idea that teenagers who were falling behind in school or dropping out did so because of such insurmountable obstacles never occurred to me or any or my friends.
Now, reading this article, I realize what a terrible disservice our school did for that community, and continues to do. Non-White Hispanic students in Arizona have some of the highest high school drop out rates in the nation. It seems that without the type of broad intervention outlined by this article, the problems are only going to get worse and the cycle will continue. Thank you for this important and moving article!