Week 8: Effects of culture on health- Nish Thiyagarajah

There is a great deal of meanings one can take from the simple phrase- the “effects of culture on health.” For one, the emotional toll that a significant move such as uprooting one’s family to transition abruptly can be “highly disruptive”(Suarez-Orozco), and such a transition can also “trigger a variety of reactions, including excitement, anticipations, and hope as well as anxiety, anger, depression, somatic complaints, and illness”(Suarez-Orozco). Immigration, in fact, is indeed stressful. 

My mom and dad right after they moved to Cincinnati.

In the case of my parents, it proved to be stressful to the breaking point, in fact. I’ve talked to my dad and mom, as well as others, over the years, and generally I hear the same kind of thing over and over. The way it’s told to me, you come here and attempt to establish a live, maybe have children, go to school, find a job, etc. However, there apparently comes a time for pretty much every immigrant, most of them at least, where you develop an incredibly strong desire to go home and you miss everything about said home country. My mother was almost driven to insanity by this pressure, and so badly wanted to go back to Sri Lanka and see her father and brothers that she sadly went a year too early, against the advice of our lawyers, and voided hers and my father’s visas, or something of the like, I don’t know the specifics down to a tee because that part of it isn’t all that important to me, but she ended up stuck there, with the sad realization that she had been looking at the wrong concept of “family” all along, in terms of me, my sister and dad. 

Right after I was born.

I only say this because it’s a very good example, in my mind, of how the effects of such mental stress can go totally wrong. I think that at times being in a completely foreign place without any kind of connection to your concept of home can just be overwhelming if things at home aren’t just perfect. For my mother, learning English and going from being a valedictorian in high school to struggling to get by at NKU, simply because of the language barrier, was very much overwhelming and hard to get over. It caused all kinds of problems, and when anything frustrated her at home, it took things to a metaphorical breaking point. I think that at times, though, people can persevere through, such as the case of my father, who just read and reread books of English grammar and semantics until they clicked for him. 

In the case of children, who might not understand how to adjust, this could potentially cause all kinds of problems, if their parents aren’t particularly supportive. Luckily for Kevin, even though he’s quiet, he has a family that cares about him and keeps a very comfortable and reinforcing home environment.