MENTAL HEALTH & DISTRESS IN AD

Mental health is increasingly seen as fundamental to human functioning, comprising psychological, emotional, and personal and social well being. Additionally, the world is continuously becoming more globalised, which has made cross-national migration, both attractive as well as attainable. Such migration has as its own consequence thereby increased substantially during recent decades (Castles & Miller, 2003). This trend has probably contributed to the increased attention given to immigrants' mental health as it has made their often difficult situations more visible. The present endeavor was planned to assess the perceived psychological distress, (i.e. depression anxiety and stress) in immigrants and their level of psychological immunogens and life satisfaction. The objectives of the study were (1) to investigate the differences in acculturation strategies being used by the sample of two different nation cultures i.e. Indian and Nepali (2) to find out the effect of nationality and duration of immigration (i.e. less than one year, 1-5 years and more than five years) on different acculturation strategies being used by immigrants (3) to examine the effect of nationality and duration of immigration in relation to both positive and negative measures of mental health (4) to find out the relationship between negative and positive measures of mental health in different duration and nationality groups i.e. Indian and Nepali immigrant groups (5) to investigate the relationship between negative and positive mental health measures with the use of different acculturation strategies (6) to find out the predictive 13 power of use of different acculturation strategies to predict positive and negative mental health. For the preceding study it was hypothesized that (1) there will be no differences in acculturation strategies being used by the sample of two different nation cultures i.e. Indian and Nepali (2) there will be negative correlation between positive and negative mental health in different duration immigrant groups (3) there will be negative correlation between positive and negative metal health in two different nationality groups i.e. Indian and Nepali (4) there will be differences in perceived distress with different duration of immigration and in two different nationality groups i.e. Indian and Nepali (5) there will be differences in psychological immunogens and level of life satisfaction with different duration of immigration two different nationality groups i.e. Indian and Nepali (6) integration strategy would negatively predict positive mental health and positively predict negative mental health (7) assimilation, separation and marginalization would negatively predict positive mental health and positively predict negative mental health. The data was collected on 280 immigrants (140 Indian immigrants and 140 Nepali immigrants) aged 20-60 years (Mean Age= 37.32 years). The study sample was employed from the Nepali immigrants residing in India and Indian immigrants residing in Nepal from the Indo-Nepal border areas alongside the eastern Uttar Pradesh border areas habitat. For data collection firstly an open ended interview was taken to understand the process of psychological adjustment in immigrants. A semi- structured interview schedule was constructed with focus on the obstacles, causes and consequences of migration, time 14 taken for adjustment in host country, time taken for well adjustment in the host country and the indicators of proper adjustment, immigrants preference to host/ native culture, identity formation and social relation among family members after migrating to host the culture. Besides the interview following measuring tools had been applied for data collectionTo measures positive dimensions of mental health Psychological Immunogens Questionnaire (PIQ) and Life Satisfaction scale was used. PIQ was developed by the present researcher aligned with the research supervisor.