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ABSTRACT
This article presents a review of recent studies based on Statistics Canada's health surveys to examine the mental health of immigrants and its changes overtime, and documents factors found to influence mental health. The article concludes with a discussion on recent developments in data collection at Statistics Canada and how the data can shed light on immigrant mental health.
INTRODUCTION
Immigration has increased the diversity in Canada over the past 40 years. According to the 2006 census, recent immigrants (those arriving within the last five years) mainly came from Asia (58%), followed by Europe (16%) (Chui et al. 2007). The corresponding figures were drastically different in 1971 at 11% and 61% respectively. Immigrants, especially those from the non-traditional sources such as Asia and Africa, may face adjustment challenges because many of these are visible minorities who come from countries with cultures and languages very different from those of Canada. The difficulties associated with settling in a new country are likely to affect the mental health of immigrants.
Past studies on immigrant health mostly found a health advantage among immigrants to Canada, possibly a result of strong selection factors.1 However, these studies also found a loss in this advantage over time in several standard health measures including self-reported health (Chen et al. 1996a; Newbold and Danforth 2003; Ng et al. 2005), self-reported chronic disease (Pérez 2002; McDonald and Kenndy 2004), self-reported disability (Chen et al. 1996a; Chen et al. 1996b), and mortality (Wilkins et al. 2008).2 Previous research on immigrant mental health in Canada, however, has found that immigrants experienced high level of psychiatric disorders, depression or substance abuse. These studies have typically focused on specific sub-groups of immigrants such as refugees or recent immigrants from various war-torn parts of the world (Ali 2002). Because mental health of immigrants is emerging as an important issue in Canada (Khanlou 2009), there is a need to have an overall picture of it at a population level.
This article has three objectives. First, it reviews selected studies based on population-based health surveys from Statistics Canada to establish whether the healthy immigrant effect at arrival and its loss over time extends to the mental health.3 Second, we report on important factors found to influence mental health for...